


Clock Wise

by Figure_of_Dismay



Category: Continuum (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Fish out of Water, Gen, Slow Burn, Time Travel, loss of a child, the slowest of burns
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-03-07
Updated: 2017-07-11
Packaged: 2018-05-25 05:22:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 43,444
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6182065
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Figure_of_Dismay/pseuds/Figure_of_Dismay
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An AU based around S1&2 events -- with a twist. An exploration of Kira and Alec's unusual and often complicated relationship. Kiera begins to question if it's really right to preserve the timeline, and even if she truly wants to go back to her own time. Alec is torn between his drive to help Kiera, his ambition, and his fear of becoming the ruthless CEO from Kiera's 2077.<br/></p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> An AU built from S1 and S2 with an injection of realism and a stretched and rearranged timeline. Will deal with some mytharc from later seasons, Escher, the Freelancers, because i have A Plan to deal those dropped plot points, but no "red" and "green" timeline and no Brad & Dark Kellogg timeline.
> 
> Aside from those basics... yes, I made Alec a little older. Hear me out here, it's not (just) for Eventual Pairing Reasons, but because he seems very, very much like one of those brilliant but aimless guys who took a gap year, and then another, and then another, and so on, and drifted away from his high school friends, and just basically couldn't figure out how to make a beginning with the talent he has. That isolation and dissatisfaction is a big part of his character so it made more sense with how he's actually written. He isn't written in the show as a fresh faced kid, he's written as a talented but bitter and aimless 20-something. I think SB got caught up in the math for Old Alec and forgot that with extreme wealth and tech, they could have made Young Alec even ten years older and Future Alec still could have been a powerful old man full of regrets and plotting a last ditch, though misguided effort to save humanity.
> 
> So, as per Clock Wise canon, Alec's birthday is December 28th 1989 and he had been 22 for 3 months when Kiera landed in 2012. Kiera's birthday is in 2049 as per Showcase's timeline and also according to their timeline she entered the military at 16, was 28 when she left 2077. I'm on the fence about that but it does make sense from her behavior that she was fully subsumed into the system from a very young age. Kiera's birthday is May 5th.
> 
> I'm doing my best with Kiera's backstory, and am working from a streamlined version of it with hopefully not so many contradictory pieces of information. I lean towards the early characterization of Kiera, a young woman who is naive and indoctrinated, but when forced into this alien landscape of the past she is able and willing to learn, and broaden her understanding, and questions a lot of her assumptions.
> 
> Yes, this is an eventual Alec/Kiera pairing fic, but my main focus is exploring Kiera herself, and then the closeness and difficulties of their unusual partnership and how they both cope with the potential power and influence given their inside knowledge. At its core it's a close and complicated friendship. As for the less-platonic side? I hope i will make my case and you will trust me enough to go with it... but there is still a long way between here and there.

The first time she realized that she was adjusting to life in the past was the tender, fragrant June of 2012, four months into her ordeal. Summer was cooler than she remembered back home, and the affluent didn’t flee the city for the countryside the way they did in her time. It was still hot enough, though, her little, once fine but now slightly shabby and worn down hotel didn’t have centralized air conditioning, just a box the manager installed in her window. She’d seen such things in movies set in the past, but she’d stared in dismay when it was put in.

She didn’t spend much time in her hotel, in any case. Liberate had been active with dozens of petty crimes. She kept busy, her and Carlos and Betty, with Alec on the other side of her ear piece. She’d been there long enough that her colleagues’ prodding inquiries into her origins and intentions had fallen off, at least to the point where she and Alec could manage them with practiced routines.

The work was good, it was satisfying. She felt like she was making progress. Not with her way home, no, but with the effort to keep the Liberate massage from spreading and taking over, or at least in keeping them from harming too many more members of the public. She left herself little time to be concerned with the broader picture of her life, and she was getting something done and that was enough.

She’d always craved routine, even as a small child, never minding her father’s regimented strictness, and floundering in her mother’s haphazard style when he was gone. It shouldn’t have surprised her when she developed a routine in the past, but it did. She hadn’t even noticed at first, it had snuck up on her while she buried her head in case-files and constant half-arguments about time travel theory and morality with Alec, rather than actually sitting and thinking of the reality of it.

She’d stopped expecting to hear hover traffic overhead. She’d stopped trying to find insta-zolve packets in the drug store when she needed something to ease the pains of a tough fight. She’d learned which of the restaurants and coffee carts around the hotel and the station had dishes she liked or the most affordable lattes, and which Carlos would take her to when they needed a break from a case. She even went to the farmers market every other saturday because the Sadler family sold produce there in the summer and fall, and Alec’s mother usually pulled a dutiful-son-who-ought-to-be-in-college-by-now guilt trip on him in an effort to get him to go outside and talk to people sometimes, and dragged him along. 

She liked those days actually. It was nice to spend an hour or two by the waterfront, people watching at the popular summer market, basking in the cool breeze off the shore. Alec was usually surprisingly good company, although he was usually in a foul mood at first, after a morning of being patient and accommodating with Roland and Julian. It was nice to actually see the face of the person she talked to so often.

She even had a little bit of spending money by then, thanks to a loophole that allowed for a small per diem from the VPD while she was ‘transferred’ to their department. It wasn’t a lot, but it was enough to clothe and feed her if she was careful. Things were a lot cheaper in the twenty-tens anyway, and it wasn’t like she was planning on setting up a household. She hadn’t found herself flat broke since landing in the past, at least. 

It was a tiny, limited social circle, and a small number of routine comforts, but it was something. It was more like a life and less like a waiting period. It was a sign that she was beginning to put down roots without even noticing it.

One of the few actually prosecutable cases she’d worked on had gone to court. She stopped at the coffee cart in the plaza by the station and the barista smiled at her in recognition and asked after her partner, wrote her name on the paper cup from memory. It wasn’t the first time it had happened either, since Kiera stopped at the cart a couple times a week, and the petite, round faced girl with the thick, dark braid was sweet and chatty. For some reason, though, that grey, muggy morning it startled her. 

She knew people in 2012 and people knew her, talked to her, expected her presence. In an hour or two she’d be giving evidence in a courtroom, her name on the record. She wasn’t just floating invisibly through life in the past on her way to getting home. No matter how hard she tried to limit her interference, her life intersected with other lives, and she was getting used to it. 

She made it to the courthouse before coming to a complete, panicked stop. She was irrationally sure that just going and having her name on the record was going to get her in trouble down the line. But then, it was probably too late to prevent that anyway, she was one of the detectives on record on a number of cases by then. Her fingerprints were out there, her supposed employment with Section Six. The more people looked over it all, the more likely it was that someone was going to notice that nothing about her quite lined up.

“You have to get me back out of the system, Alec,” she said abruptly, forgetting to pantomime a phone call. She got a couple odd looks from passers by, but she ignored them.

“What system?” he asked, right away, and ready to go with it.

But he balked when she explained that she wanted him to start wiping away the trail he’d made for her, her forged legitimacy.

“It isn’t completely perfect, okay, but it’s what’s keeping everyone from looking more closely. You need that, Kiera. Maybe we’re not as suspicious and big brothered now as in your time, but we’re still pretty serious about it. I made it look as normal as i could while still being intimidatingly classified. It’ll hold. It’s like that old spy thing about being noticeable to blend in.”

She hadn’t been completely convinced, hadn’t been convinced at all really. She felt like she could see her doom barreling down on her from bureaucratic highways. It was warm, and the clouds had cleared away in a sweet breeze, so the gentle 2012 summer sun was shining on her skin. But she felt chilled as the day she’d landed in that strange time, that unusually icy night in March.

She let it go though, in the end. She had to. Carlos came out to look for her, wondering why she hadn’t met up with him in the lobby at the time they’d agreed on. She’d fumbled for her phone and pretended she was wrapping up a difficult call, pacing away from him to cover her lapse. 

He’d asked if it was family trouble, said she had that wound up look. She had absolutely no idea what to tell him, no convenient lie sprang to mind. She changed the subject, tried to avoid noticing his concerned frown. That was something, too. She’d been there long enough for the people around her to worry over her when she was acting strange. It was human nature. In some ways it was nice, reassuring to know her partner cared, to know that Alec was looking out for her. In a lot of other ways though it reminded her of the guilt that rose and fell in her like the tide.

**

It started with a long stint of tracking the actions and funding of yet another grass roots protest group to see if it had Liberate connections or whether it was simply another disenfranchised Occupy off-shoot. Mostly it was street kids and college kids banding together with signs and tents and a system of hand gestures, trying to keep the original occupy spirit alive. They kept trying to camp the park and the city was trying to straddle the line of living up to their liberal-minded reputation, and trying not to let the movement grow to be a public safety and health hazard.

Kiera went along on a lot of casual interviews with protesters and realized that the real activists among the opportunists and the homeless hoping for some entertainment and a place to camp were people who had broken away from the militant factions in a self righteous huff. They were pacifists, a little naive and more than a little arrogant, but not likely to start something dangerous on their own.

No one was sure how Liberate was going to react to a non-violent organization pushing in on their territory. She had urged caution to Dillon and the others in the meetings at the station about how hard they cracked down when the time came. She was worried that Liberate would take the chance to start an out and out conflict between the protesters and police, firming up public antipathy to the government and bringing in more followers. She knew all too well how quickly it could and would spiral from there, with the protesters becoming more radicalized the more they saw themselves as persecuted.

It was November, 2012 dwindling away in a slow creep of dim, grey and green days thick with cloying damp, and Kiera spent her afternoons lurking around the edges of the Occupy encampments, watching for Liberate interference. The Occupy protests were largely ineffective and also not the media circus that the Wall Street originator had been, but the people of this time didn't know how quickly the tides would turn in the coming decade, or maybe the next. The protests would begin escalating in the coming years and the coming strife, though she couldn't remember exactly when. Liberate would know, would remember more clearly than she did most likely, the pattern that built to what happened in Chicago, and then New York, and then DC under the last American president.

She'd been cold and footsore for what felt like weeks on end. Even when the protesters that had homes to go to shambled off for the night, she walked the city, feeling ghostly and agitated as she passed by shop windows that had already begun to fill with holiday displays and dark, damp alleyways where homeless milled and tried to camp out. She'd been restless, between cases but no nearer to understanding her situation, and trying to avoid nights alone in her long-stay hotel room.

The tension broke one pale, bitingly clear and cold afternoon, just before the bulk of the protest would have naturally dissipated. An angry young man, just a kid really but tall and broad-shouldered, got into a shoving match with the cops trying to herd a breakaway group back onto the sidewalk, his friends jumping in to defend him. The frustration on both sides turned to confrontation, and the officers on scene had leapt at the chance to break up the demonstration.

She'd been at the station when it happened, all set to say that the protests were petering out and it didn't seem like Liberate was interested. By the evening several contentious arrests had been made, and by midnight there was a cellphone video of the young, unarmed teenagers getting slammed down and restrained by cops in riot gear going viral. Not plot, or a plant, a genuine altercation.

The next few days were chaos. The Occupy protestors lost their nerve, but they were replaced by Liberate supporters galvanized into action, though not the original members themselves. A few storefronts were smashed, a couple cars were burned, the media swarmed, the poor kid from the video was released on bail with a minor charge. Uniform mopped up with an implacable fervor that was only a taste of what was to come. The numbers on both sides only seemed to be growing, and the people showing up weren't naive kids, but angry adults looking to yell and fight, many of them bussed in from out of town following online calls to action.

Kiera was sure they were headed for yet another grotesque display of brinkmanship and violence. She'd seen Garza sniffing around the scene one day, and Valentine the next, she was sure Liberate proper was about to get involved, but suddenly the weather turned. Pelting rain and high winds, great walloping body-blow gusts of the kind that would have been softened and eaten up by the wind breaks and turbines along the shore back home in her time.

A storm had blown in off the water and even the angriest protesters couldn't stick it out. They'd dispersed, intent on finding shelter, grumbling and slinging a last volley of insults as they melted away from the police barriers and into the grey, sodden city. The uniform cops had filed back into the station, sodden and vigorous, and put away their riot gear. They'd nodded to each other and joked around, as if congratulating themselves on their victory, as if they'd driven the protesters away and not the brutal wind and blinding rain. The stand-off had been diffused for the time being, but each side had walked away more sure that they were the ones in the right.

Kiera looked on from the sidelines, suddenly feeling that the whole thing was an exercise in futility. Her actions, Liberate's actions, all of it seemed surplus to requirements, society was going to churn itself to pieces on the way to the future no matter what she did, or they did, how hard she dragged at the machinery to slow it, or Liberate tried to hurry it along.

Liberate wanted to start a war, but they were too late, the war was already there, it was already being fought even without the interference of a handful of agitators shipwrecked in a strange land. She wanted to laugh, she wanted to go tell them how pointless it all was, how they were wasting their time. She wanted to go tell them how little their anger and their menace and their grandiose fantasies mattered in the face of a world that had already passed its breaking point, was already disintegrating without their help.

Mostly, though, she wanted her head to stop aching. And maybe to sleep for a solid week, catch up on some of that rest she’d been unable to get for far too long. She sat at her borrowed desk at the station and rubbed her temples and wondered vaguely if Alec could simply switch her off for a while, like a computer terminal on standby, since the conventional methods of lying down and closing her eyes hadn’t been working so well lately. 

**

The next thing she knew, she was blinking blearily and lifting her head from the desk as someone shook her shoulder and someone called her name in her ear and her head felt like someone driving something sharp and burning slowly through it.

“Kiera, are you okay? Kiera? Can you answer me? I’m getting some kind of weird readings over here.”

“I think I fell asleep,” she mumbled, squinting around at the thankfully dim bullpen and noticing that her HUD was popping up on its own and then flickering strangely. 

Betty was looking down at her, a concerned expression on her face. “I noticed. You okay, there? It’s getting even nastier out there, Dillon's sending all non-essentials home so we're not driving around in it."

"I'm getting some really weird feedback over here, Kiera, when you have a minute," Alec repeated, and she could hear a strained edge in his voice that would worry her if she could care about anything beyond the pain in her head.

"That's good, it's been a long couple weeks... I'm just going to wake up a little more and then head out."

She smiled politely and Betty let it go with a doubtful look, probably too eager to get on the road to give her colleagues’ awkward manner too much thought. She was grateful for that. She needed to collect herself a little and then contact Alec. Maybe the other way around since he’d been pestering in her ear for a response, and she had the vague feeling that he'd been trying while she'd been out, too. 

She pulled her phone out of her pocket, even in this state that she would look like a crazy person without it. She wished her HUD would stay off when she tried to deactivate it, it was making her feel disoriented.

“Something’s wrong,” was the first thing she said.

“Yeah, I can see that. The whole interface seems to be malfunctioning. I’m trying to get in there to assess from my end, but I can’t get access, it’s not working well enough for me to repair. I think I need the hard connection, get you and the suit hooked up to the main rig.”

“My head is killing me, and my HUD’s not working right, it’s very distracting. Can you break that down for me?”

“I don’t want to worry you, but I’m running into a brick wall. You need to come here so I can hook your CMR and suit up directly, channels aren’t cutting it,” he said, and his voice sounded tight, stressed, and she knew how much it took to rattle him. 

“I can’t drive like this, Alec, not with all this visual static.”

“Yeah. And you were really out of it for a while, when the interface froze. Okay, that would not be safe. What about Betty, she just left, I bet you could still catch her and get a ride with her.”

“And tell her what, exactly? I need you to drive me to this farm an hour outside town and leave me there, and I may not stay conscious the whole time but you can’t ask any questions?”

“Well, yeah. I mean, it would get you here faster and we could come up with something later. She’s a cop, right? she should understand about ‘classified,’ right?”

“Cop is just a way of saying snoop with a badge, Alec. I don’t want her knowing anything more than she has to.”

“Right. No, that was never going to work. Shit. I’ll have to come get you. The mysterious future tech just had to go and bork itself when it’s stormpocolypse out there, didn’t it.”

“I don’t mean to be such a burden to you,” she snapped, “It’s not great timing for me either, you know.”

“You’re not, Kiera, I promise you are not. But it’s gonna take me forever to get out your way in this weather, and then we have to get back. You’re going to be uncomfortable for at least a couple more hours and I can’t monitor you from on the road. At least if I can’t get in to your systems, we can be pretty sure no one else can either.”

“Oh. I didn’t think about that. You don’t think it’s Ingram again, do you?”

“No, no outside interference. You okay, Kiera? I can hardly hear you”

“Yeah,” she said, and closed her eyes, trying to shore herself up, “Fine. I should probably try and get to the hotel, Dillon sent all non-essentials home because of the storm, it’ll raise questions if I keep sitting around here.”

“You just said you weren’t okay to drive, Kiera. Maybe you should stay put.”

“My legs work, and I don’t think getting rained on can actually make anything worse at this point. It’s not a long walk, anyway. I’ll be fine.”

“You could hide in the conference room again, at least then you’d stay warm and dry.”

“I don’t need you trying to mother me, Alec. Anyway, I don’t think you coming to the station is much better than Betty driving me out to the farm.”

“Fine, fine. Just remember that this was your choice when you come down with pneumonia. Your readings already don't look great.”

“It’s just safer this way,” she insisted, “And what have I told you about looking at the biometrics?” 

“I was checking because you were unresponsive for a bit there, I was worried something had happened. That is totally a special circumstances exemption, and you know it,” he said, sounding remarkably like he was lecturing her.

“Oh. Right,” she said softly, realizing that she’d scared him, “I’m still going back to the hotel though.” 

“Yep. Of course. I knew you weren’t going to listen, but I had to give it a try.”

“Just get here already, Alec,” she said, voice sharp and strained, and dropped the phone in her pocket, as though that would do a thing to sever the comm line in her head. He didn’t say anything more though, and she supposed the real, urgent concern in his voice earlier meant he wasn’t interested in dragging his feet or indulging in banter any more than she was at that point.

She had managed to get herself upright, and was carefully easing on her coat, aware that moving too sharply was not in actuality going to short out her brain, but also plagued by the sensations that told her that such a thing could be possible. 

The fact that Alec seemed truly worried unsettled her, though, and the fact that she apparently depended on the confidence of a 22 year old kid to buoy her own unsettled her further. 

She already wanted to go back on her determination to get back to her hotel and go sit quietly in the darkened conference room, as Alec had suggested. But both her possible discovery and Alec’s eventual appearance would both raise questions she couldn’t answer without more strings of lies that could eventually trap them both.

She’d managed to carry on despite burns or bleeding wounds back in the Frontier War, she wasn’t about to let a headache and a malfunctioning HUD stop her. It was a twenty minute walk she’d made dozens of times in the nine months she’d been in 2012, and her coat was reasonably waterproof. She would be fine.

**

Walking back to her hotel turned out to be, as it was always going to, a mistake. The rain fell solidly, in fat icy drops propelled this way and that by gusts of wind, so that they were as likely to strike her in the face as anything, and she’d badly overestimated the weather resistance of her trusty green anorak. The cold and the walking jarred her headache until it filled up her head, leaving her with nothing but blankness and pain and desperation to get somewhere warm and dry where she could hold still. 

At least in the dark, with the rain blurring the amber sodium lights, which were long replaced with brighter, more cutting fixtures in her own time, the flickering and failing of her HUD switching itself on and off didn’t bother her as much. Maybe her brain was filtering out the flickering of her visual interface, or maybe the system had stopped asserting itself and had shut off at last, she wasn’t sure. She was squinting through the rain and wind most of the time anyway, feeling the wind shoving her this way and that, leaving her feeling as unsteady as a drunk.

The manager who sat behind the front desk most nights was asleep reclined in his chair with earbuds in and a smartphone or some kind of device balanced on his chest. She glanced in at the kiosk and then stopped for a while at the foot of the stairs and came to a decision. The lift had been out of order the entire eight months she’d been camped out at that down-at-the-heels long stay establishment. She wasn’t going to walk up three flights of stairs only to come down them again in a short while, not when the mere thought of jarring her head that much made her nauseous. 

She ducked around the main desk to the alcove with the bank of post boxes, and settled on the hard bench beneath them. It was warm, it was dry, the light was golden and diffuse and the air smelled faintly hot and dusty, an oddly comforting combination. She was out of the way of drafts and passers by from the front door to the stairs, private enough for sitting and waiting. 

Her suit was already warming up and drying out next to her skin, even if her blouse and jacket were still sodden and heavy. Her surroundings felt dreamlike, seemed to shift fuzzily around her. She tipped her head back against the wall and closed her eyes.

**

She woke to Alec’s voice in her ear again, saying something that sounded urgent but she wasn’t tracking it very well. It didn’t feel like a specific hot, stabbing pain in her head anymore, nothing so localized. Instead it was like static, loud, painful static that caromed through her skull and buzzed in her joints. 

She was ill, she realized, not just suffering from malfunctioning tech, but sick like she hadn’t been since she was a little girl, kept in bed with a fever that raged and burned. It had been during the Swine Flu epidemic of 2054, and her mother worried so much she’d convinced Kiera’s father to pay for the doctor to come to their apartment, but in the end it had just been a normal virus. Kiera had been very young and oblivious to the danger, and her mother hadn’t told her how worried they’d been until several years later, but the memory of those half-delirious nights and her mother’s white, pensive face above her had disturbed her for years.

She hardly ever got sick, not with the regular vaccines provided by the military and the CPS. She hadn't recognized the feeling. She didn’t like it. It made her feel young and lost and stretched wire-thin. It made her think of her mother sitting at her bedside, patient and doting in a way that she never was when Kiera was older, made her think of how unlikely it was that she would ever see her mother again. 

She protested softly and tried to duck away from the persistent noise. What noise? Oh right, Alec. Saying something, saying something with a growing urgency.

“What is it, Alec?” she mumbled irritably.

She was curled up on something hard and uncomfortable, but resting there was preferable trying to make sense of the world. The world could wait five minutes for once. He said her name again, more insistent, and then was startled to feel a hand on her arm. She opened her eyes and saw that Alec was there, in front of her, not talking to her through the comline. He looked rain-spattered and wind-blown and faintly amused.

“Ah, she wakes at last,” he said, “Come on, the truck’s right out front.”

“Okay,” she said, and failed to move.

“Wow, you are out of it, huh? I’m sorry, Kiera. I’ll get this sorted out soon. Do you need a hand up?”

“No,” she said. 

But it was slow going levering herself away from the low, wooden bench, and she relented and let Alec manhandle her upright. She leaned heavily on his shoulder as they headed back out into the night. The November storm hit them with a wet slap as they crossed the sidewalk and she squinted against the lingering mist.

She didn’t really remember the ride out to the farm, although she was partially aware of the sensation of traveling at some speed. It was still strange to her and she wasn’t sure if she would ever get used to it, if she would be around in this time long enough to stop noticing. Traveling by road car was a much more full sensory experience, more visceral. 

She dozed as Alec drove, and her fevered awareness slipped between the feel of the road buzzing in the pit of her stomach and some dark, hollow dream like a wasteland of space where she drifted. Time stretched, endless and unmoored.

Then she was being cajoled out of the truck and into an immense, cavernous place, pungent with a grassy, earthy smell; a huge old-fashioned barn. Alec ushered her up a flight of stairs, along a wooden balcony where their footsteps echoed, surprisingly in synch, up another few steps. She watched him key in a code on the pad beside the door and he glanced at her with an intent look that she couldn’t interpret.

“You know, I’ve always wanted to show this place off to you, but I didn’t figure it would be under such shitty circumstances,” he said, his voice pitched low and full of wry regret.

**

When she first arrived in 2012 she was so sure it was all only temporary. If she’d been flung through time once, then it must not be so inconceivable that the same device could be used again, the same conditions replicated, to be returned. She’d thought of her time as a place, a simple destination that continued to exist in her absence, as though she’d merely taken one the shuttle flights and just had to wait for the next transport home. 

She’d even heard a scientific interest piece on the news one late night, when Sam was just a baby and up all hours, fussing and chewing on teething toys, about how moments in time might be sort of like particles or atoms that had always existed and always would exist, and we only passed through them one at a time because that was how we perceived things and made sense of them. She’d liked the idea at the time, the idea that there were still permanent, living moments out there where Hannah was alive and happy, that her boisterous childhood was preserved somewhere out there, even if Kiera couldn’t find it or see it again. Deterministic, they’d said, a deterministic universe, and she’d liked that too. It was comforting, it meant that as messy and tedious and strung together with tragedy and uncertainty as her life often seemed, she was going the right way, doing what she was meant to be doing, what she was always going to have done.

The longer she stayed in the past, though, and the more her attempts to get all the right components in the right place to get her home failed miserably, the more her certainty dissolved. Her life in the future wasn’t just a location, but an outcome of hundreds of thousands of choices that had to happen exactly so, or nothing would be as she remembered it. And it was clear that the universe didn’t, after all, resist change, the fact that Kellog’s grandmother had been killed was proof enough of that. He hadn’t been winked out of existence in their uncertain present, in the past, but who knew what of his influences in their home time had been erased. 

And then there was Alec. She’d heard the usual gossip about him in the future, they all had. SadTech was powerful, famous, a leading voice in the corporate lobby and was heavily subsidized as a result. It was a company that reached fingers into all aspects of ordinary people’s lives and it flourished madly in the free market economy. Alec Sadler of 2077 lead his company with vision, shrewdness and an iron fist. He was arguably more powerful than the figurehead president in Washington, and while his genius was widely lauded, and every SadTech innovation dominated the news cycles, the unspoken truth was that he was widely feared.

Greg claimed it was all rumour and innuendo, but what was he going to say? He had begun a meteoric rise through the ranks at work, his allegiance was always going to be to Sadler and the work. She hadn’t ever felt the need to push the issue, she and Sam benefited just as much from Greg’s favoured position at work and she didn’t want to show discontent or become a nagging wife. She’d been sure there had been some truth to it though; there was too much evidence to support the case that the head of SadTech was ruthless and too fond of power.

In the green and fertile present of 2012, though, she couldn’t connect that rumoured figure with the young man she knew. He was earnest, he was hopeful, he was so very sweet. He went to such endearing lengths to help her and support her, breaking laws, hacking into government databases, staying up all hours to be her constant tech support. His eyes were bright and watchful and his smile was shy and full of self deprecating humour. He had a bit of a problem respecting her boundaries, but then she had to admit to herself, after whatever crises of the moment had passed, she didn’t do a great job of respecting his either. In short, he was nothing like the formidable old man she’d met only briefly, who’d spoken to her kindly but without personal interest, as though he’d been assured in the fact that he owned the whole world, including her. 

The existence of the future she remembered, the one where her clever, shy, precious baby boy waited for her to come home, hinged on the rise of SadTech and Alec Sadler. The more she got to know Alec, though, the more she had the creeping feeling that that was a morally dubious proposition. And maybe not even possible, given the hints she'd unwittingly given him about his future, and the way he'd reacted to them. 

Would he still blindly seek power and fame? Could she really demand that he follow the same path from the timeline she knew, despite his obvious reservations? She wasn't sure anymore. 

**

The first thing Alec did when he showed her to his workroom was sit her in his high backed desk chair the wrong way around, and connect a cable from his sprawling nest of equipment to her CMR port. 

“Okay, hang on,” he said, “I’m going to do some sampling, and then I'm going to force a full system shut down. You may feel a twinge but then you should be more comfortable.” 

Alec’s loft in the barn was faintly damp, the air clammy and cool, and the rain drummed on the metal roof high above them with a constant eerie roar. The light came mainly from the dozen or so monitors arranged around his ring of desks, and a few unshaded work lights beyond them. The air was thick with the smell of warm electronics and cut wood and moist earth. It was surprisingly comfortable, sheltered and cave like, as though Alec had managed to hide her away somewhere, far from harm. 

He muttered vaguely to himself, things she didn’t try to follow, the habit of long hours of work alone and unobserved. There was a concentrated clattering of keys. She folded her arms across the chair back and rested her head atop them, closing her eyes. After a few minutes of typing and quiet plotting, she began to fidget the rolling chair backward and forward with her foot, not a lot, just a little. She felt restless and achy, like she wanted to twitch away from the unpleasant cycling and failing of her tech, the nasty static in her head.

“Please don’t move,” said Alec, turning away from where he was hunched over a desk to stop her bodily with a hand on chair and a foot on the casters. She’d taken his only chair, she realized, but the quarters were still cramped. He waited until she looked up at him, catching his serious expression. “If you get disconnected while I’m doing this, it would probably be… not so good.”

“You could tell me what you’re doing,” she said, thinking that if he talked to her instead of vaguely in her vicinity, it would distract her from worrying.

“I did tell you,” he said shortly, “I’m sorry, okay, but would you rather I fixed it or explained it?”

“Fine.”

“Anyway, I wanna know is what the hell is wrong with me,” he said, sounding outraged and entirely serious, although she feels a little lost. 

“With you? I’m the one who…”

“Not now me, future me, future apparently arrogant jackass me who decided it was a good idea to put a lot of very complicated, very fragile tech into people’s brains. What kind of person does that? What kind of person doesn’t even think about the consequences of when the thing inevitably breaks or malfunctions? I have a hard time believing I could possibly be that deluded or insensitive.”

“You probably thought that there would always be people around who knew how to fix it. I always got regular updates back home. No one could have expected my particular… everything,” she said, confused by his vehemence. It was the first time he’d seemed less than impressed with her integrated tech. She felt surprisingly defensive, even though that tech was currently making her miserable.

“It’s incredibly stupid, Kiera, sticking tech right into your head,” he snapped, peering close at one screen, and another. He didn’t seem to realize what he’d said to her.

“I’m not stupid,” she said, so softly she didn’t think he’d heard and frowning down at her folded arms. The hot, muffling feverish feeling dragged at her. It had been a long, grinding couple weeks and she was ill and in pain and suddenly her closest friend in that time seemed to be calling her stupid. It was too much.

“What? Oh wait, this looks like-- Oh, thank fuck. I found the off switch. Ready, Kiera?”

But he didn’t wait for her answer, just did whatever it was. He was right, there was a jolt. It was almost like a sound, a loud and brief sound, except it only happened on the inside of her ears. Her jaw clenched involuntarily for a couple seconds, and then there was silence. No HUD. No CMR reset loop. No static in her head, no stabbing pain at the port site. No database either, or feedback from her suit. 

He’d turned the whole system entirely off. She was as completely disconnected from her support system as she’d ever been since joining the CPS.

“What did you do?” she asked, hollow voiced.

“I’m pretty sure I can fix it,” said Alec, his voice young and soft and hopeful for her approval for the first time that night, “It might take me a little time, though.”


	2. Chapter 2

The trouble was, of course, that she was lovely. He’d known what could happen from the first time he saw her face, a dim, blurred reflection on one of his screens. She was lovely and tall and lost and determined, with these big sad eyes and this wistful smile. Of course he was always going to fall for her and fall hard, though he'd done a good job of pretending to himself that he hadn't for a good six months. The truth was that there was never going to be any other way but through, and whatever kind of hard landing awaited him on the other side, when all of it was done. 

He didn't expect anything from her though, he didn't even hope. In fact he hoped she never knew, or if she guessed, never embarrassed then both by bringing it up. She showed no signs of catching on, and he was glad.

He was glad also that it didn’t strike him like the time he fell for Rebecca Cahill when he was 15 and turned into a blushing, stuttering wreck. That had been painful and a shock to his confidence, though short lived. Or like when he fell in love with Miranda Yao in his junior year of high school, and drifted into a dreamy haze, spurred on by the fumbling, girlish, patient way Mira returned his feelings. He had been preoccupied with the sweetness of first love in those two years they were together, and he'd had teachers and counselors shaking their heads at how he was wasting his talent, his promise letting his school work slide. 

This was something different. It didn’t cloud his head, it didn't leave him preoccupied or eat up his concentration. Being in love with Kiera was just something that was there. He knew it, the way he knew that the loft was hot and oven-like in high summer and that it was unfailingly cold in the fall and winter, and either way he just carried on. this love was like that, big and immovable but not over-mastering, just climate conditions.

He wasn’t a love struck fool, he didn’t intend to blunder about pining. If anything it sharpened his focus, burned in him like fuel. It lit him up inside and shored up his crumbling determination to accomplish anything or make something of himself. He loved Kiera and he loved her cause, and her tech and her lostness and her sweet, soft voice and the bright snap of her demands. He felt in some obscure way that he was sure to never voice, not even completely to himself, that he could devote himself to her for all his life, and be happy, so long as he could be the one to answer her calls for help. So long as he could be the one she trusted. It was all he asked.

**

She woke up early in the morning when the sound of the rain on the barn roof petered away to silence. A large, very plush orange cat sat beside her on the narrow bed, stared down at her with wide green eyes. She startled backward, surprised, and then stared back as she blinked herself awake. She hadn’t lived in a building that allowed pets since she’d been a little girl, she’d forgotten the strange intensity of a feline stare. The cat leaned close and sniffed her face and then turn and leapt away, jostling the bed springs. 

There was a wide window in the partitioned off living space of Alec’s loft, she hadn’t noticed it the night before. The storm had cleared, and thin, pearly daylight poured in, shrinking and solidifying the vast, distorted proportions of the place she’d remembered. She could clearly see the dark green, battered chintz couch beneath the window, a flat television standing on a large wooden crate, the dark brass frame and pile of woolen blankets on the narrow day-bed where she’d slept. She could see that the sheets and blankets that sectioned off the living room weren't just strung up, but were pinned to framed in walls that had never been finished. She imagined she could almost feel the cool grayness of the daylight on her face, but maybe that was just the pervasive chill of the loft.

There were fuzzy parts of her memory from the night before, and no recording to playback to fill in the gaps. She kept reaching for it, but the system was well and truly off, she couldn’t even feel it try to activate. She tried not to feel claustrophobic in the limitations of her own mind. She’d lived without tech for 24 years of her life, surely she could go without it for a day or two. 

She remembered Alec blustering and fussing around her until she got up from his chair, although she could happily have slept there for hours if left in peace. She remembered him leading her away from the workspace into the dark depths of the loft, a space that seemed to be filled with looming objects. He’d led her into a curtained off room within the loft that was almost like a tiny apartment. 

She remembered being left sitting alone for a small eternity, and feeling like she didn’t want to move beyond the small puddle of yellow light cast by the one lamp, a tall, gaudy brass thing standing between the sofa and the bedstead. She remembered feeling dizzy, and gripped with a chill that seemed to collapse her inwards.

Sometime later Alec had reappeared with a pile of soft, warm clothes, a bottle of pills and a bottle of sports drink. He kept apologizing. For taking so long running to the house and back, for the primitive setup, for the state of her tech, even for the cold and damp, which even in that state she knew he couldn't have helped. She’d let it all pass over her head, not arguing with him, but not accepting either.

“Alec, please,” was all she’d said, and took the clothes he’d handed her. She held them to her chest for a while, feeling lost.

“Well, listen,” he’d said after a polite pause, “Those aren’t going to do you much good just holding them. Don’t take this the wrong way, but you’ve got this kind of drowned look going on that cannot be fun.”

She changed in the large but strange and rather haphazard bathroom attached to the loft, tucked into the eaves. It was better lit than the sitting area had been, but she still tripped twice on the odd half-step up to the sink and vanity. The pipes squealed and sputtered as she ran water to wash up, and it came out bone-aching cold. Her reflection in the mirror was not particularly encouraging, like a ghostly stranger’s face, though she looked pink and clean after getting rid of her remaining makeup. 

She’d almost kept the suit on, feeling vulnerable in the quiet wake of the malfunction, but Alec said he’d need it to work on. She’d never slept in it anyway, no matter how tempted she’d been in the early days. She wasn’t a child, she’d reasoned, she didn’t need a security blanket. She folded it up and set it aside, and changed as quickly as she was able, shivering badly. 

When she’d come back out, she saw that Alec had turned the TV on and was sitting on the lumpy looking couch. He’d jumped up when he noticed her. She’d wanted to ask what was wrong with him, why he was so wound up, but that wasn’t the kind of thing they usually talked about. Instead she just asked if he’d made any progress on the malfunction yet

“I wanted to make sure you were all set before I disappeared into the data,” Alec had said, not sounding nervous at all, but soft and kind, the way he often did when he knew she’d been having a hard day. 

He’d peeled back the blankets and sheet on the daybed, added some more pillows, obviously trying to make it seem more like a place to sleep than a place to sit. It looked cozier than her bunk at the Academy, anyway, and the patter of rain on the metal roof with the quiet television made a bland, friendly white noise. Alec explained how to set the thermostat of the bulky metal space heater he’d rolled out from the corner, handed her the bottle of fever reducers and the gatorade again, firmly suggesting she actually take some. 

Alec did so much for her, she realized, so much. She’d be so lost in this green and primitive land without his brilliance and his generosity and his endless curiosity about her and her life. It was so much to demand of a young man, a stranger. And he always came through for her, with good humor and winsome pride. She looked up at him, all pale and angular and awkward, meeting her intent gaze with a confused smile, and wondered how he did it. 

She wanted to ask him, or at least say something about it to show that she noticed. Or that she noticed sometimes anyway, when she wasn’t entirely distracted by a case or the current Liberate plot. Instead she took her pills, and then made a face at the taste of the sports drink, peering at the bottle with sudden suspicion.

“What, they don’t have gatorade in your time?”

“Of course they do, but it doesn’t taste like this. This is just like fruit flavored sugar water.”

“Oh come on, it’s not that sweet,” he yelped, “And with the electrolytes it’s practically a health drink.”

“Ugh. You’re such a child,” she said, and then realized that might have been a dumb thing to say.

“Says the woman who buys that syrupy peach lemonade every time she goes to the Summer Market,” he said, “And anyway, I’m not that young anymore. If I’d gone to college I probably would have graduated and then some, by now.”

She made a vague sound and didn’t point out how such protestations don’t exactly help his case. She’d already been through the Academy at his age, and been deployed for a few years. It was really strange to think about that time, when she was young but tough and believed so completely that she was fighting for what was right. It felt more like a dream than anything, a brutal kind of fairy tale she’d told herself.

“You should get some rest, Kiera. Do you want me to leave the TV on for company?”

“Okay.”

She’d dozed for a long time before she truly slept. She’d listened to the rain, to the tv turned down so low that all she could hear was the studio audience laughter of the sitcoms and not the jokes that preceded it so that it sounded almost like waves lapping at the shore. Beyond that she’d listened for the faint clacking of keys and rolling of casters as Alec worked away beyond the cloth partition wall. 

In the morning her head felt clearer. As she lay still in the thin, glaring dawn, she thought she was well again, her fever cleared. Then she sat up, and by the way her perception of the motion lagged muzzily behind, she knew that was not so. 

“Alec?” she called, trying to see through to the work space. 

There was no reply. She tried again to access her comm channel and failed. She considered getting up and investigating, but it was early and the air out from under the covers was chilly despite the efforts of the slowly ticking space heater. 

She pulled up the hood of her borrowed sweatshirt and turned away from the window, burrowing back down under the covers. She’d figure it all out later.

**

Kiera’s life had been shaped largely by the ways she had to plot and pit herself against some larger force. When she was a child it was the haphazardness of her mother’s approach to life and her steady favouritism of bold, creative, lively Hannah over her own pallid, cautious, staid self. When she was a teen looking to enter the Academy it was her father’s reserve and skepticism, his attitude towards her always falling shy of either approval or disapproval. When she was a young woman there had been the dependable, implacable surety of of her unit commander in the Peacekeeper Service and the kindly, paternalistic dismissal of her lieutenant at the CPS. 

Even Greg had been a hard man to convince when her plans didn't line up with his. He tried to reason with her gently but with insistence. If that didn’t convince her, he tried to wait her out with this patient, unmalicious scorn as though she was a stubborn child who didn't know what was best. It was something that she hadn't noticed in him until they were married, and Sam was on the way. 

Now there was no one to answer to. There were no orders to follow. All she had was her own intuition and her memories of the history that was still to come. She didn’t feel equipped to deal with the responsibility that had fallen on her shoulders. She’d never lived her life without the hand of some respected and intimidating person or organization heavy on her shoulder, guiding her. Without that opposition to maneuver around, without a resistance against which to press her resolve, she found herself at a loss.

Her decisions were becoming reactive, impulsive. Without that structure, that restriction, she didn’t feel freed. She was terrified. She didn’t plan her resistance or swallow her objections and go along, she just acted, and then looked at those actions later and wondered if they were justified.

She’d always thought herself a strong, independent, pragmatic person. But here in the past, cut off from the strictures and customs upon which she’d always leaned without realizing it, she was beginning to see how sheltered and dependent she’d always been. Here there was no one’s approval to seek. Here there was no one to obey. 

Hannah had berated her towards the end, when her sister still lived in reality some of the time but had been running from it, for not having any spirit. For not thinking for herself. 

_You’re like this good, perfect robot,_ Hanna had accused on the last leave home Kiera’d had before the end of her time with the PKS, _I used to think you had a true self hidden deep down and if I looked hard enough I could find it and bring it out. But I just don’t know anymore, Kiera._

Her mother had tried to break up the argument, trying not to back one daughter over the other, begging them to have some compassion for each other. Hannah had drunk too much with dinner, was young and angry and couldn’t seem to find her start in life and Kiera had dismissed her accusations as old resentment warmed by wine. The words had stuck with her for years.

In the bleakness, the nascency and unprotected clamour of 2012, Kiera found that there was unbending iron in her. She found that in times of danger and crisis there an inborn voice in her that told her to fight and keep fighting, an instinct that seemed to know, on the brink of momentous events, what the right thing was. She also found that she had no idea how to consult that instinct without the press of imminent disaster, in her day to day life.

The people native to this past seemed to know how, though. They were more like Hannah, more like her mother. The lived darting, vibrant, selfish lives. They shared their close-held opinions as easily as breathing. She envied them. With an honesty and fierceness she’d never allowed herself to feel over Hannah, she envied them. 

**

Sometime later she woke for real. It was brighter and warmer and Alec was making coffee with his bare bones kitchenette in the corner of the living space. There was a small fridge, an electric kettle and a toaster oven on a small table next to it in the midst of a clutter of mugs and odds and ends. She got the feeling that he was mostly living out of the loft, and she could understand why given the tensions with his step-father and Julian. 

She got up, feeling strange lying around now that she wasn’t alone. She came over and watched him go through a lengthy process with a bulbous carafe, grounds, a filter and water slowly poured over the top. People in 2012 had such elaborate rituals for their caffeine. She found it endearing. 

Coffee was prohibitively expensive in her time, some growing regions badly affected by climate change and others made largely inaccessible by political instability in the region. Back home she’d drunk the powdered lab-grown stuff, drowned with sugar and soy-creamer, but only for the caffeine boost not for the joy of it.

“I didn’t know you had a cat,” she said, as they waited for the coffee, for something to say.

“Oh, did you meet Seamus? He’s supposed to be the barn cat but he mostly hangs out here in the loft. He’s good company. He keeps the mice away from the wires, anyway.”

“Mice?” she said, ever so slightly alarmed. She’d thought of farm pests as being from even longer ago then when she was stranded.

Alec gave her an askance look. “Yes, mice. You know, little furry skittery things, apocryphally thought to eat cheese? I’m sure mice are still around in 60 years.”

“Of course. Just not inside where people live.” She assumed that was so anyway. She’d lived in high rise buildings most of her life, and those had to be well sealed because of smog and energy conservation concerns. No one worried about rodents anymore.

Alec just smiled at her wryly. She could tell he wanted to tease, but restrained himself. He went to get rid of the filter and coffee grounds instead. So much bother, she thought again, but it sure tasted better in this time than the bitter black powder she’d dissolved with hot water every morning back home.

After handing her a mug, done up with milk from a glass bottle and no sugar, just like his, Alec jumped right in, as though they were in the middle of the conversation they’d left off the night before.

“Have you ever heard of a bootstrap paradox? Also known as a causal loop or a retrocausality. The simplest example i’ve seen to explain it involves a time traveler with questions about a certain field-revolutionizationizing math proof. He takes the proof in his time machine to visit the author at the time that he published it, and the mathematician is confused, says he’s given up on ever publishing it because he can’t solve it. The time traveler lets him look at the finished proof, and the mathematician says, ‘that’s easy, I solved it after all.’ But did he really solve it?” Alec said and shrugged, “All he did was read the answer. The answer had his name on it, sure, but that’s not really the same thing. So where did the information really come from? How did it get into the timeline, and did the mathematician really understand it or did he just take what was in front of him.”

“I’m tired, and still a little feverish i think, so forgive me if I don’t get it, but what does that have to do with…” she shrugged, at a loss, “Anything?”

“The point is that you, Kiera, have dropped us in the middle of a bootstrap paradox. You didn’t mean to, but just by landing here, that’s we’re rattling around in. You came back in time and told me I invented this system-- and I know that because here it is,” he said, gesturing in her direction, at the workspace beyond the doorway where she knew the suit was hooked up, “And it’s really cool, you have to admit. But it’s technology that’s built on things I haven’t done yet, and might not even do in this timeline. It’s here in front of me, but that doesn’t mean I understand it. Do you see what I’m saying?”

“What does that mean, functionally, for fixing my CMR?”

“I’m sure can do it. It’s going to take a little time, but that’s mainly a matter of me just physically reading the data I’ve got and seeing where the problem is. All the code is pretty intuitive, which makes sense. What worries me is problems down the line. The longer you’re away from the support this system was meant to have, the more bugs it will develop, and there’s a difference between learning how to fix issues once they show up and actually understanding how the system works from the ground up,” he said, and ran his hands back through his hair and sighed. “I’m not saying don’t use it, or that I can’t fix it right now. But all I can do is crisis-manage. You might have to be more careful to turn it off and reset it at regular intervals, maybe using it less. I don’t know.”

“That’s a lot to think about. I don’t know. I rely on that tech, Alec. It’s how I do my job.”

“It’s not all of how you do your job, though. The tech is just a tool, a really, mind-blowingly awesome tool, yeah, but it’s just there to help you. And on the other hand, it’s a pretty shitty tool if it’s making you actively miserable, the way it was yesterday,” he said, “It’s also not there, I’m pretty sure, to enable you to pull days on end of vigilante super-hero lurking.”

“Is this actually a really weird version of the ‘you should take better care of yourself’ speech?,” asked Kiera, defensive, “Because I’ve heard that speech plenty of times, from people with far more right to comment than you, and my answer is always the same. I know my limits, I know what I’m doing. I’m fine.”

“I know that you’re on this mission, okay. I get that. I think it’s actually this really amazing thing. But pushing yourself literally to the brink of collapse is… You didn’t see yourself yesterday, Kiera,” he said, staring at her with serious, wide eyes that told her just how much he had worried. Then he shook his head and moved on. “But that isn’t really what I mean. I’m saying that I haven’t caught up to where I could even think of inventing something like that chip. Even my abilities here have some limits, so some care should be taken because there probably is a limit to what I can fix, and I’d rather not find it. I’m not judging, okay? I’m just trying to help.”

Her tech had been integrated into her training. It was instinctive to use it, and what's more it seemed to be the only thing enabling her effectiveness as a lone agent here in this time. She didn't want to think of it as fallible or breakable. 

“Okay, Alec,” was all she said, but she didn't mean it as an agreement to change her habits and she was sure by the way he frowned at her her before dropping her gaze that he’d been able to figure that out.

“Right, well,” he said, his tone changing from serious to sheepish, “Sorry about this but I have to go do chores or someone will come looking for me, and find you here, raising all sorts of interesting questions.”

She realized he was dressed differently, in a thick sweater and battered jeans and tall, muddy rubber boots. He looked youthful and strong, yet somehow older than she usually pictured him. He looked like he could have stepped out of any time since the second World War, even more foreign to her than usual. It was a working farm, she remembered, yet she still couldn’t actually picture Alec, with his milky pallor and elegant hands, doing farm labour. 

“So you didn’t try and explain my presence here at all, I take it,” she said, relieved and disappointed.

“I was going to. I wanted to be able to show you around. I thought you might like to meet the horses. But I couldn’t think of an explanation that made any kind of sense.”

“It’s just as well.”

“Anyway, there’s food in the fridge, and I won’t be long. After that I want to try a couple fixes, if you’re up to it. If my hunches are right, you could be back to your regularly scheduled programming by this afternoon.”

She she followed him out into the main area of the loft and watched as he put on a battered looking checked barn coat from the back of a chair. She’d seen Alec wear that coat before, and in town it had seemed the kind of ironic statement that many of the fashionable 20-somethings of the era liked to make. But out there, in that huge old barn with its perpetual damp and on that wide and rolling farm which she’d glimpsed from the loft window, she could see that he was in earnest and at ease. The future greatest tech mogul of all time was grown on country soil, and he was going off to do chores. 

“I get the feeling that you’re laughing at me right now, Kiera,” Alec said wryly.

“It’s just ironic, isn’t? Under all that computer genius bluster you’re really a farm boy a heart,” she said and grinned.

“Yeah, yeah, very funny,” he said, but he seemed pleased. “Won’t be long. Feel free to poke around.”

**

The fixes he tried did not work. 

Alec took on a look more and more pinched and uncertain as his attempts fell through, but she never doubted that he would think of something before long. She tried saying something along those lines and all she got in return was a dismissive noise of annoyance. At himself, she was sure, for not solving the problem the first try, but it didn’t do a lot for her mood either.

“Do you really think it’s stupid of me to get the CMR?” she asked into the heavy silence in the loft.

She had changed back into her own mostly dry clothes and washed up while he’d been gone, so she felt a bit more human. When he came back she’d followed him to the work space and stolen his chair again. The cord connecting her port to the computer rig tugged and itched at the back of her neck but not so much that she couldn’t sit still and ignore it. She remembered his previous warning and kept her feet firmly planted.

“Well… I wouldn’t personally want one.”

“They’re standard issue, you know. Like your badge and your gun, you can’t be CPS without the chip and the lens implants. Problems are very rare. I don’t think even that you would have shipped them out to the Service if they were dangerous.”

“I don’t think you personally were stupid to get your tech, Kiera, that isn’t what I meant at all. I’m sure it’s different in your time. And the tech is really, really impressive, plus it’s a good idea in theory, especially for cops. It’s just that after seeing the chip give you so much grief like now, or with the hack…” he said, and stopped what he was doing, she heard the clicking and typing go silent. She was tempted to crane around and look at him, but didn’t want to dislodge the cable. “I guess I think someone somewhere up the line outsmarted themselves a little in pushing tech like this to the public,” he explained at last, “When my mother’s new laptop wound up in that nasty Win 8 disk cleaning loop of death a couple weeks ago, it was a hassle and and a massive annoyance but everyone was fine, you know? When your chip crashes, it’s not just a hunk of plastic that’s on the line, it’s you, Kiera. And that’s why I’m not going to stop thinking _he_ is an idiot for putting you in this position.”

She didn’t know what to say to that. She couldn’t even turn around to look at him because of the cable, and wasn’t sure she wanted to anyway. She went still instead. She didn’t want to understand what drove the hardness to his voice, the anger and protectiveness on her behalf, but she had a sinking suspicion that she did. 

He’ll get over it, she thought, he’s so young. It’s just the novelty of it all. She decided to pretend very hard that the thought had never occurred to her. She would probably forget about it in the midst of the next emergency, whatever that would turn out to be. Maybe she wouldn’t be in this time long enough for it become a problem, though a quick return was looking less and less likely. 

Alec would grow up and move on and everything would be fine.

**

In the end he decided to unhook her and regroup. 

The short November day was already fading beyond the cavern of the loft but the weather remained relatively clear, a thin scrim of clouds stretched across the sky glowing bright as white gold as the setting sun shone across them. She’d wanted to see a little of the farm before she went back to the city and Alec had said that Julian and Roland would be away at one of their meetings most of the evening so they’d ventured out.

There was so much space, so much rolling land, dotted with tall old maples and crossed with fences. The fenced pasture was steep and shaggy and rolling until it sloped away into dense forest land bordered the farm. The planting fields were higher and flatter and shorn to a muddy stubble for the winter, stretching off away until they met the fences and fields of the neighbor’s property. Between the horse pasture and the growing land was a large, pretty blue and white farm house, it’s windows lighted against the evening gloom and it’s chimney sending up a thin curl of pale smoke. The whole picture was like something out of a fairy tale, or those novels about the pioneers her mother read to her when she was little and Hannah was a baby.

Kiera was still worn, and it was chilly, and getting dark so they didn’t go far, just along the pasture and up to an ancient and half-dead stand of fruit trees on a hill that overlooked most of the property. The grass was overgrown but not so wild that they had to wade through it, and silvered with rainwater and dew. The earth was soft and spongy beneath her feet. The air was so clean and rich with the scents of the wide countryside and fresh rain. Even the faint sweet, fermented smell of the windfall apples withering among the fallen leaves seemed wholesome and right. It was like nothing she had known. 

“It’s so green,” she said softly, with reverence, “Sam would’ve…”

They had stopped walking and leaned against one of the twisted, bulbous trunks. Across the fields, the wooded hills in the distance rose up like black-green shadows filmed with mist. She looked out into that hazy vista rather than meet Alec’s sympathetic gaze.

“Yeah,” he said, surprising her, “It was a good place to grow up. When I was little the farm seemed like a whole country. Or sometimes like a whole alien planet, depending on the game that day.”

“Was it a working farm then, too?”

“Oh yeah, it was a bigger operation then, actually. When my dad died, it seemed like too much to keep up with. Not that he was ever that involved in the farm side of things, but my mom didn’t want to deal with anything for a while, and I was only nine. Too young to help out.”

They were quiet for a while, watching the smoke rise from the farmhouse chimney and the landscape slowly desaturate with dusk. The last of the grey afternoon faded away into deep, thick blue twilight, the air sticky with the approaching frost. She could almost taste the creeping coldness of the oncoming night. She rubbed at her fingers, stuffed deep in her pockets, trying to get the blood flowing.

“Why don’t you stick around for a while, come in and have dinner with us,” said Alec suddenly, “Julian always stays over at the Campbell’s after the meetings so it’ll be quiet. My mom’s a good cook, and Roland’s got intense beliefs but he’s good with company and doesn’t proselytize unless you’re family. It’s also actually warm in the house, which would be a nice change.”

“And tell your parents what exactly about who I am?” she asked, deeply skeptical. It was tempting, she did want to meet Alec’s family, size up the mysterious stepfather for herself. She wanted to because Alec really did seem to want her to be there, his face luminous and hopeful. But she was sometimes unsettled about how much she, a grown woman with a family of her own, leaned on this young man, and had no easily plausible explanation for her presence in his life. Though there was nothing inappropriate between them, she still sometimes felt that she was crossing some moral line just by being there, presenting him with what his future could be, and she wasn’t sure that she wanted to look his mother in the eye.

“That you’re my friend. That you’re new to the area and out here alone. That we met online and came out to see a project I’m working on. I've thought about it and really, a non-answer answer is best. It’s all pretty much the truth anyway,” he said with a shrug. “I don’t think Roland needs to know that either of us are consulting with the police. It wouldn’t do a lot to improve the atmosphere of the evening.”

“You aren’t consulting with the police. I am consulting with them, and you are my consultant. I’ve been very careful to keep you from getting too involved,” she protested.

“Uh huh. That’s exactly the line to take if the subject ever comes up.”

“Alec, I’m serious.”

“And I’m serious about my invitation,” he said, speaking urgently and turning to face her, “I think you’re too isolated, Kiera, and I think you haven’t had a real meal in too long. I also think that you and my mother with get along, although keeping her from trying to adopt you when she hears even the sanitized version of your story could be a challenge. She heard Roland’s story and married him after all.”

She watched his face fill with exasperation and affection and realized that, no matter how separately he held himself from his family, his relationship with his mother was better than hers had ever been with either of her parents. She was curious. She wanted to see it. But still, she was tired and vulnerable and underprepared. 

“Thank you. I know you mean it. But not tonight, Alec, okay?”

“Right. I understand.”

“Maybe when I come back,” she said, feeling suddenly that it was an invitation that she shouldn't let slip entirely through her fingers, “When you fix the CMR glitch. That will be soon right?”

“Yes, Kiera,” he said patiently, “That will be soon. Come on, it's getting dark. I'll go grab the keys and take you back into town.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> not quite a thrilling chapter, maybe, but I'm working on establishing tone. And getting into Kiera's perspective is an interesting journey.
> 
> for those of you who might not realize the brevity of the days late in autumn up here in the PNW and may be confused about the timing, the sun starts to set about 4:30pm in November. If it's been cloudy it feels even earlier. This is about as dreary as you'd imagine, but the evenings are beautiful and cozy, so none of us really mind.
> 
> the next section is half-written and in the works. I hope you will let me know what you think.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> six days without the interface

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A transitional chapter, with apologies for the long wait. Kiera POV. Chapter 4 is underway and coming along nicely. Next up we get to see into Alec's point of view, and it should become clear to you which parts of the plot i rearranged. I have ~plans you see ;). Please do tell me what you think, i would love to know if there is an audience for this fic!

She dreamed of Sam sometimes. It wasn't something that she could predict, often it happened that these dreams came to her when she was most distracted from her son, her past. She would dream of him sitting in the living room, good pale head bent seriously over one of his puzzles, or over his tiny soldiers set up in elaborate campaigns of his own design. She dreamt of him quiet and preoccupied and always distant, just out of reach. 

Once she dreamt that, instead of her hotel room, instead even of the bed she had shared with her husband, she slept in her old room in her mother's apartment. The room that she had left for good when she went to the academy at sixteen, and yet could still could picture more completely than any other. And in that familiar doorway Sam had stood, like a sweet and patient little ghost. 

“Did you have a bad dream?” She'd asked, mildly concerned but, with the logic of dreams, unaware that she hadn't seen him in months, that she should be rushing to her lost son and holding him tight. 

Sam shook his head, but he seemed upset, melancholy. Her little boy could be such a solemn child that she sometimes had a hard time telling when he was truly distressed or when he was just lost in thought. The little, parchment colored globe lamp on her old bedside table was as dim as she remembered it and she couldn’t see Sam clearly. Sleepy, worried little Sam, with his favorite pajamas with the saturns and the shooting stars, stood and watched her, the dark hall behind him stretching out with an unaccustomed endlessness.

“Do you want to stay here with me for a while? It’s a long time til morning,” she said, and shifted in her old familiar bed. Sam was little but growing fast, and he tended to sprawl in his sleep. When he wanted to stay with her and Greg, somehow Sam flung his slender arms and legs out wide enough that he took up most of the space. Greg wasn’t there though, and she wondered why, why her son but not her husband, why her mother’s home and not her own, with the slow, muddled confusion of sleep thoughts. 

She lay still and expected Sam’s slight weight to settle in at her side, his heavy silky head at her shoulder, but it never came, he never climbed in beside her.

She turned and woke herself instead, found herself groping through empty hotel sheets for her boy before realizing she’d been dreaming. 

She hadn’t heard Sam’s voice in more than half a year. Not even even in dreams, for in those he never seemed to speak. She tried to console herself that he wasn’t getting older without her. His time had yet to even begin. It didn’t help much.

**

She lived without the tech for six days. For the first she stuck close to the hotel, trying to catch up on rest and hoping she didn’t get called in on an investigation. 

The second day she felt better, and pushed herself through the truncated version of her training routine that she could manage without the CPS gym or Elaina there to spar with. She couldn't just rely on the suit for added strength, she needed her own muscles to sustain it and practiced reflex to come without thought or hesitation. She had no real backup here, not in the same way as back home, and if she got seriously injured there was a lot she wouldn't be able to explain to any hospital. 

She'd been letting it go lately, too distracted, if she were honest with herself, too dispirited. She pushed herself hard and it was a strain, but at the end of the day it was a healthy feeling of tiredness instead of a thin, ragged exhaustion. She was trained enough to know the soreness in her muscles for the building of strength it was and took a kind of satisfaction in it. 

The third day she went into the station and realized that she'd been leaning on her tech far more than she had realized. She found herself reaching for it, and remembering that it wasn’t there, over and over in the course of the day. She thought she was getting better at not using it so often, trying to work on equal terms with Carlos and Betty and the others around her. Only there was a difference between imposing restraint on using the tools habitually available to her, and being fully cut off from them. 

There wasn't a lot going on. Liberate was quiet enough to make her worry that they were plotting something big. She had seen Garza and Valentine at the Occupy protests, but other than that it had been over a month since the hacking incident. Not even Kellogg had shown his face recently.

There was small stuff to catch up on though, some malicious vandalism, and an arson case by the wharf with a burnt out warehouse and possible signs of recent occupation. Things she doubted led back to Liberate itself, but still had to be checked out.

A couple of days of legwork, and the only things she learned from it was that without her tech she didn’t feel much certainty in her own conclusions and that she still hated crosstown driving in the primitive road cars of the era. 

**

Carlos caught a suspicious death investigation on the fourth day and Kiera tagged along, for want of anything better to do. He kept looking over at her, expecting her to produce mysterious, terse, prophetic insights as usual, but she couldn’t do any better than he could. Still, murder was murder, and human behavior had not fundamentally altered in the 60-somthing years that would pass, and even without biometric scans it wasn’t hard to figure out.

Of course, she and Carlos still initially disagreed about what had happened. There must, after all, remain some constants in life. And she found that she still wanted to argue for her version of events even without the concrete evidence from her tech. Even a few months back she might not have been willing to do the same.

“Are you alright?” Carlos asked her at the end of the day, “You seem kind of… subdued. Your terrorists look like they're taking a break, for the time being. If you're not back up to snuff, I can certainly hold down the fort for a bit.”

“Trying to get rid of me?”

“No, just concerned. When you aren't marching through the middle of my case, making inexplicable but accurate pronouncements, I begin to suspect something is terribly wrong, or that you're up to something. Are you up to something, Kiera?” he asked, somewhere between teasing and suspicious -- as he often seemed to do around her. 

“No, I'm not up to something, Carlos.”

“Well then, is there something wrong? Anything I can do to help?”

“No… nothing's really wrong. Just having a few off days, I guess. Even we mysterious agents get them from time to time,” she said and tried to smile, be of good humor and banter naturally the way she'd learned to do with her partner. It felt forced. 

“Okay, well… I don't think we're going to get any farther with this tonight, you want to come get a drink? I won't ask you about the whatever it is that you don't want to talk about, and you can keep arguing your case, unsupported though it is…?”

She hesitated. Spending time with Carlos could either be comfortable and reassuring, or it could be wrenchingly awkward as he balked at her strangeness and asked questions she was helpless to answer. She didn’t want to go back to her hotel just yet, though. She agreed, with a tired smile.

“Is Betty still here? We should ask her along,” she said.

Betty and Carlos’s long friendship eased the way for a comfortable evening. They knew how to talk of things that were not work, and though some of those things weren’t familiar to her, like current sports and pop culture, they had a way of talking about them that made her feel included. Their talk washed around her, Betty’s latest dating adventures, the next chapter in Carlos’ complicated feud with his sister, like a welcome but unaccustomed noise to which she slowly acclimated. 

Mostly though, drinks after work involved station gossip. And undoubtedly the most interesting figure of station gossip, save perhaps for Kiera herself, was Inspector Dillon. Not only was he their boss, the drama of his tumultuous marriage, his prolonged divorce, his difficulties with a rebellious teen daughter, frequently seemed to unfold in and around the office -- especially since the inspector’s ex was a detective in another division.

Kiera understood the curiosity, and understood even better that their boss’ complicated personal life and general mood had a direct effect on their work life. What surprised her was the way their concern was equally personal and genuine, not just self-interest. The Protector’s chain of command was rigid, intentionally so. 

While forming a bond with your partner or squad was vital and expected, Officers were meant to view their superiors without sentiment, without question, as if orders were dispensed from an inhuman and infallible machine of justice. Carlos and Betty, though, seemed to have no trouble viewing their superior officer as just another person, struggling through life trying to do the right thing.

“I guess Section Six divisions must work a bit differently, huh,” Betty had said when Kiera had expressed curiosity and disbelief over their worry for Dillon.

“There isn’t really room for… familiarity,” She’d said, thinking not of her little fictitious team of ‘Section Six’ but the CPS back home, “the theory is that we’re there to do our duty, not to make it personal.”

“That sounds very rigid, wow. But I guess that make sense when everything you do is super classified. No room for error and all that,” Betty had said, and Kiera had let Betty take her silence as agreement.

Probably they gossiped and were concerned about her, too when she wasn’t with them. She was strange and alarming and in their midst. But she’d been very careful about what she disclosed, resorting at times to pointed silence when Carlos questioned her. It wasn’t like idle gossip was going to leap to the right conclusion about her anyway, no one just assumed time travel.

“Look, it’s not a big deal, but it just adds to my worry he’s going off the rails a little,” Betty was saying, in the present conversation at their table in the corner.

“And I still think he's just being the usual amount of asshole,” said Carlos, “Though it's not like having Liberate hovering around helps any. I still don't understand why they picked here of all places to set up shop. We have a nice city but it's not like we're a seat of power and influence. Do you have any insight into that, Kiera?”

The insight she had was not something she could share, as it had to do with the kind of predictions that were still viewed as apocalyptic conspiracy theory in this era. The Cascadia region would be a seat of power though, and Liberate knew that all too well. Maybe it was even something they hoped to precipitate, knowing the potential was there.

“I… I don't know. Maybe they hope to make it influential.”

“So, I delusions of grandeur then, on to of the bent for psychotic destruction,” he said with an ironic laugh, “Well, I think it's that time. Some of us have to get up and solve a murder tomorrow morning.”

When Carlos had gone, Betty turned to her, her face worried and sympathetic. “I know he said not to ask, but I have to say… I'm ten times as worried about you as I am about the boss. Are you okay, Kiera?”

She gave her usual tired smile, nothing to see here move along, but it had been a strange few days and she had enough to drink to feel warm and tired, to feel the weight of her reality with a slow pressure. 

“I’m okay,” she said, “I am. I will be. The road just feels long right now.”

“You’re doing good work, you know,” said Betty softly, “We’d be nowhere with Liberate if it weren’t for your agency’s resources. You take it so seriously though, all of the time. Maybe you just need a break now and then. Even secret agents have to give it a rest sometimes right?”

She looked into Betty’s encouraging expression, her friendly smile, and knew she was looking at yet another person unbitten by the hunger that would come, unhoned and unwaried by the constant threat of attack or the debt collector or the threat of being written up for infractions or subversion and informed on by your neighbors. There was no way to explain what Liberate represented in this time, this untouched land poised on the brink. No way, too, to explain that she didn’t want to unwind and have fun here the past, that she didn’t want to enjoy its comforts or it would be the first step on giving up, on never seeing Sam again.

“I haven’t seen my family in nine months,” she said, which was the heart of her unhappiness, the truth of it if not the fullness of it. Saying it allowed, seeing Betty’s face shift with sympathy made it feel so real, but it was a relief, too.

“I’m sorry, that must be hard. Surely even Section Six would let you have leave to go visit them, right? How old is your son again?”

“It’s more complicated than that,” said Kiera tightly and began collecting herself, stood up and put her coat on.

“Hey, don’t go, I’ll stop prodding okay? Everyone says I’m too nosey.”

“I should get home, there’s someone I’m supposed to get in touch with anyway.”

“Want me to give you a ride? I’m good to drive,” Betty offered but she shook her head, thinking that the cold air sounded good, cleansing.

“I like to walk.”

**

It was a long way back to her hotel and it was late when she set out, the November cold stinging her cheeks as she walked herself to warmth. It was later still when she got her back to her room, the night shift manager fast asleep behind the front desk again as she strode past, the hallways all empty and the other rooms behind their blank doors still and quiet. It was late enough that every sensible person was long asleep.

Still, she called Alec. Still he answered right away, sounding distracted and wide awake.

“I don’t think I have it yet, sorry,” was the first thing he said after saying ‘hey, Kiera,’ not even waiting for her to ask.

“I have a case, Alec, I need my tech working again,” she said.

“Liberate?”

“No, just an ordinary case but that doesn’t mean it’s not still important,” she said and sighed, sitting gently on the edge of her bed, “Any estimate on when you’ll have a fix?”

“Not too long. I’ve mapped the system now, I’m getting a handle on it... But I still can’t say exactly when, sorry.”

“Okay. I understand, really I do. I just thought maybe…”

“Hey, it’s pretty late for those of us not on hacker time. Everything okay?”

“Yeah. Drinks with Betty and Carlos, went a little long.”

“Yeah? And how did that go?” 

Alec had been nudging her towards trying to get along with her VPD colleagues for months now. He’d helped her decode their period specific references and idioms at first, but that was becoming less and less necessary. 

“Better, I think. I didn’t say anachronistic and it felt almost… normal.”

“You know, to me those sound like good things, and yet your tone here makes it seem like the opposite of that.”

“I just never thought I’d fit in with them, that I’d have to keep so much a secret that we could never really have much to say to each other. And it’s nice to be part of a squad again, but it’s also kind of… I don’t know.”

“Ah. A milestone you never expected to reach here in this here and now.”

“Yes.”

“It’s okay to fit in you know? It’s okay to make friends. It doesn’t mean you’re giving up, it just means that you’re making your… current situation livable. You don’t wanna be like me, after all.”

“What are you talking about, you have friends. I know I’ve heard you talking about friends.”

“I have people I play online games with, I have contacts on a couple super secret forums. That’s not really the same thing.”

“That doesn’t sound right. I don’t believe you. I mean, you got me to trust you over a com-line sight unseen, and that is… really an accomplishment, believe me.”

“Well, listen, that’s a special circumstance for both of us. Honestly, Kiera, it’s pretty much just you and people who are obligated by genetics or marriage to put up with me.”

“This time travel thing isn’t always a lot of fun for either of us, is it?”

“Oh, no, this started way before you got here, believe me,” he said, emphatic, “I had people I knew growing up, people I thought I was close to, I had a girlfriend, someone I almost-- But they all went off to college, to the four corners of the world, practically, and I… Didn't. I stayed here. And now it's like we don't speak the same language anymore.”

“I didn't… I didn't really have friends in school but it was like that after my tour ended and then had Sam. You depend on your squad, it's all you have out there, but once I was out and didn't see them everyday -- it was like without that daily struggle we didn't have a lot holding us together.”

It had been a nasty shock when she’d realized that, after her father, after meeting Greg, after Hannah, after finding out about Sam, after that year long rush of madness and tragedy. Her tour with the Peacekeeper Service had ended, and she’d been busy and sad and exhausted and hadn’t spoken to any of the old gang. It hadn’t even been that long, but her life had moved on and theirs had, and when her attempts to reconnect were so awkward they were horrifying, She’d realized that they’d only had the fight and the fear and the boredom in common, and none of those were things they wanted to sit and remember. 

“Yeah. Not that I think public school is like combat, but. Yeah.”

“But then you do something else, you meet new people, you enter a new phase. You’ll meet new people, Alec. I know helping me is taking up a lot of time, and...”

“Kiera, I want you to understand this, okay?” Alec said, cutting in with unaccustomed urgency, with strange gentleness, “I’m still working on meeting you. That’s my project right now and I’m happy with that. You’re not taking too much of my time. If that changes, I will let you know because I know you appreciate the direct approach, but just between you and me? I don’t think that’s going to happen.”

“That's-- I don’t know what to say,” she said awkwardly. She had that same sinking feeling as the other day. He cared too much. And she wasn’t planning on staying, was never supposed to be there. She wasn’t even supposed to figure in his life.

“Right, stop saying embarrassing personal things to emotionally awkward future girl, got it,” he said, but he didn’t sound hurt, more amused if anything, laughing at her or himself she wasn’t sure. “Right. Back to my original point and then I stop trying to talk about feelings, okay? I just don’t think there’s anything to feel guilty about in getting along with the people around you.”

After she ended the call, she realized that only the second time she’d spoken to him that week. That was normal, she thought, a normal, boundary respecting amount of contact. But the week had seemed very quiet.

**

Kiera found that it was the most mundane things that made her feel most alien in this time. When she had to learn to use the ancient, wasteful equipment in the building laundry room, with Alec patiently walking her through it while she railed against the sticky, over-scented soap and the grotesque use of water. The water restrictions wouldn’t come into play for decades yet but she still felt a panicky sense of breaking the rules, using those machines, using well more than her ration credits would have allowed.

When she’d bought clothes in this era had been strange too. Going into shops and finding that manufacturers still used cotton cloth, and linen, when using arable land for cloth production not edible crops had long been outlawed. She’d bought a simple wool coat that would have cost her a year’s salary back home, and had felt like she was stealing treasure. She had yet to wear it, instead reached past it in her closet every day for her trusty green jacket in spite of the gathering wintery chill with a startling sense of guilt.

The supermarket was another of those strange, quaint, overwhelming places. There was so much food in this time, so much abundance heaped up in neat piles and arranged on high shelves in bright, varied, packages. The citizens of this time wandered casually through this plentitude, inured to it, their bored, placid faces unmoved. They didn’t have to pass through security scanners at the door, they didn’t have to scan their citizen chips at the checkout to mark their purchases against their allotment. Their knowledge of what was right and allowed didn’t fight with the instinct to take more than was their share and hoard it against the bad times.

The first year that she’d been with CPS had been a disastrous drought year for crops, and militants had bombed a series of Piron depots. There head been food shortages across the whole North American Union, even Cascadia had been hit. For a while it seemed like half the calls her team took were to grocery stores, convenience stores and and little roving markets of illegal food racketeers. She’d hated what they had to enforce, but people couldn’t be allowed to go around assaulting each other without consequence, couldn’t be allowed to steal what was needed by other families, couldn’t be allowed to make a profit off of the hunger of others.

She’d almost quit the CPS, that first bad year, had almost gone looking for a loophole in her five year hitch. After three years as only Sam’s mother and Greg’s well kept wife she was once again unused to that violence and desperation. She hadn’t thought it would be only slim degrees of moderation in the home sector from what it had been on the Frontiers. She’d been 24 and new and raw all over again, but she’d endured because it was the only thing to do.

In Vancouver of 2012, there had never been a food riot or a bread line or a Piron Nutribar. Sometimes she understood what Kellogg meant about enjoying the fruits of the land while they were here. Sometimes she was guilty about how well she was living compared to the family she’d left behind. 

**

On the sixth day she had almost convinced herself that she had become less dependant on her CMR. But Alec called to let her know he thought he had a fix for sure this time, and the relief was enormous. 

She wanted to rush out that night, have it set to rights, but Alec put her off, explaining that he’d been buried in working out the fix all week and he’d promised to show his face at the house and spend some time with Ann while Roland was busy. 

“You really go out of your way to avoid him, don’t you?”

“Not exactly, it just works out that way,” he said with easy humour, “It’s kinder to everyone involved though. He’s a good guy with entrenched beliefs who just happens to think that everything I choose for my life is fundamentally destructive, whereas I, the shiftless layabout living at home, find myself constitutionally incapable of not arguing with him.” 

“What, you? Argumentative? The mind boggles.”

“Listen, stubbornness and a need to win is a positive trait in my line of work, I’ll have you know.”

She agreed to come out to the farm the next afternoon instead.

“Bundle up,” he warned, “it's that time of year when I really wish my dad had gotten around to putting up insulation in the loft like he'd planned.” 

**  
Kiera had no problem finding the farm on her own with the directions Alec had given her (“stay old highway for way longer than it seems like you should until you get to a y-fork and take the left side. Stay on that for like a minute and then take the first left. Technically the street we’re on is called ‘McKinney Lane’ but the giant laurel bush on the corner ate the sign, sorry.”) and the gravel drive looped her past the house to the big weathered barn. None of it seemed as removed from reality as it had the week before. 

The sky was a wide, deep blue overhead, clearer than it had been for weeks, and it was bitterly cold. The countryside around her felt still, in every way vivid and crisp, even the faded weeds around the barn and the dull fields beyond. It was no warmer inside the barn than out, although it was out if the icy, tumbling breezes, and dark beyond the open door. She found her way slowly up to the loft, peering around as she went into the gloom at the stored, dusty farm machinery and stacked up boxes and along the way, everything around seeming dead or dormant.

Alec was nearly manic when he showed her in, talking a mile a minute about all he’d done to understand the tech. Most of it went over her head, but it seemed to her that he had at least as much familiarity now with the workings of it as the CPS techs with their updates and resets.

He’d been right about the loft. even with the old-fashioned halogen work lights beaming merrily about the work space, and even with a variety of space heaters set up at careful distances from anything electronic or flammable, it was only marginally warmer than the rest of the barn. 

“How do you stand it? It’s like living in a refrigeration unit,” she asked.

“Efficient layering and lots of carbs and hot drinks,” he said, “But I’d rather this than what it’s like when it’s hot. The cold is better for the servers. Year before last there was this scary heat wave and I had to bribe Julian and his friends into helping me move half of everything downstairs and set up fans, which was a disaster that included a broken computer tower, a broken toe and a two week feud. Never, ever again.”

In the end the installation of the fix was the work of minutes. The interface blinked on and began ticking away in that nearly imperceptible way that she noticed all over again and was glad to have back. She flicked through controls just to see them work, scanned the room around her, noting the heat signature of the cat dozing under one of the desks. She turned her biometric scanner on Alec who laughed at her and waved at himself at the monitor. 

She turned the scanners off.

“Glad to have it back, huh,” he said, grinning at her.

“You have no idea.” 

She wandered over to the worktable where the suit was laid out and dry, not floating in the suspension liquid or hooked up to the computer rig. She picked at a sleeve covetously. “I can have the suit back, too, right?”

“Yep. I needed it because of the backup mirroring, but I figure out a way to instal an emergency off option to the suit system, so if the chip freezes up again you don’t have to get it switched externally,” he said, and pointed to one of the monitors showing a schematic of the relevant menu. “I’m surprised your future guys didn’t think to put one in, actually.”

“You’re not supposed to turn it off while you’re on duty,” she said, which was only part of an explanation, but the whole thing would take a long time and would mean admitting that even she didn’t understand some of CPS’s pronouncements.

“But what about malfunctions?” he insisted, “I’ve been through this thing and it’s ingenious but we know it’s not completely infallible. Even in the right setting it could fail.”

“Like I said, problems are rare. And then your team is there, or your partner. They say they don’t want Protectors faking a glitch to get away with something. The regulations are very strict. Technically the chip is CPS property, I’m just using it.”

“Okay. That is somewhat disturbing, but okay,” he said agreeably, watching her with careful, curious eyes but clearly willing to back off. “Well, there’s an off switch now, because your partner isn’t clued in, and I really don’t think the regulations apply anymore.”

“Well, thank you. I’d rather it just not break again. But thank you.”

Alec had come to stand by the other side of the work table, and didn’t quite meet her gaze, looking awkward. She wasn’t always the best with non-verbal cues but even she could tell he was nervous about something. She felt a sudden weary apprehension.

“What is it, Alec?”

“Um,” he said, “this is the part where you’ll probably be mad at me.”

**  
So she did meet Ann Sadler, after all. 

Alec had gone with a simple heads up to people at the house about the unfamiliar car they would see, that his ‘friend from online was coming by to get help on a project’ which he’d judged largely innocuous and relatively truthful. But he hadn’t counted on the extent to which Roland’s paranoia and antipathy towards technology and modernity had had an effect on his mother. She’d asked to meet this ‘friend’ of his if they were going to be coming and going from the property. 

“You set this all up, didn’t you,” Kiera had accused, “Sometimes I think you just like to see me flounder around in awkward situations.”

“I didn’t. I don’t think it’s a bad idea, but I did not set it up. You can absolutely leave right now, no problem. Or you can take a step in changing that pattern of sneaking around you’re always complaining about.”

“And replace it with a pattern of even more lying?”

“I actually think the truth would work in this particular situation,” he said, “Between my father and Roland and, well, me, we’re used to a higher level of weird around here than most people.”

This was probably true, at least in his case, given that when they’d first met over her comline he’d gone from accusing her of being a hacker to accepting that she was a time traveler from the future and trying to help her in under five minutes. She still wondered about that sometimes, about what on earth possessed him to just believe her like that.

“Absolutely not,” she’d told him, thinking it wise to limit the number of people who knew the truth, thinking it wise not to get more embroiled than she was. 

But curiosity got the better of her and she agreed to come by the house just to say hello before heading back into town. She did want to meet Ann after all. She did want to know what the old blue house looked like on the inside. 

It was a quick trek from the barn to the back door of the farmhouse. They walked in easy silence, boots crunching through the frosty grass, hands stuffed in pockets against the cold in mute unison. Alec stopped her as she was about to climb up the steps to the back porch, an unreadable expression on his face. 

“Listen, Kiera, if at all possible could you try not to look so…” he said and gestured vaguely in her direction.

She failed absolutely to parse his pointed look and pointed silence and shook her head. “Probably not, since I have no idea what you’re getting at.”

“So much like you’re getting ready to charge in shooting, I guess is what I mean. It’s fairly intimidating. We’re here for a friendly meet and greet, and maybe a cup of tea, not open conflict, remember? No one in there wants to hurt you.”

She took a deep, steadying breath and nodded.

The first thing she noticed about the house was that it was warm, blessedly warm, her nose and fingertips tingled coming back to life. It was cheery and old fashioned, but no more so than other houses she’d visited in this era in the course of investigations. 

The walls were white, and the floors were old, real wood and the kitchen they stepped into was big and airy and clean but not stripped of it’s character and comfort for the sake of modernity. The cooking area opened out into a dining room, set with a simple table and chairs and lit with tall windows that overlooked a tidy back garden, thin, bright sunlight spilling in. The air smelled sweet and yeasty, like baking bread, a homey, childhood scent she’d half-forgotten and then, walking into it, remembered with a nostalgia that was also sweet.

There were two women in the kitchen, leaning against the counter and talking. They seemed roughly the same age, one shorter and stocky and blonde, the other tallish and slender and brown haired. Either seemed a likely candidate to be Alec’s mother, but it was the younger, darker one of the two who noticed him and responded to him as he child -- not the one Kiera had suspected. 

The blonde woman was introduced as Mary Hoyt, a neighbor who worked in the city, who stabled her pair of horses with the Sadlers and came by to visit them on the weekends. Her son was a friend of Julian’s, Alec explained. Mary was polite and took her leave however, after Alec introduced her to Ann simply as ‘my friend, Kiera,’ and the tension in the general atmosphere became noticeable. 

Ann was pale and fine featured they way Alec was, but her eyes were dark, and cautious in a way that was unlike him. She was dressed in nice quality casual clothes and little makeup, she looked clean and strong and capable. Ann’s carefully neutral assessing look became startled and strained as she seized Kiera up, and Kiera supposed she hadn’t managed to look less intimidating after all.

Kiera gathered herself and remembered her ‘company’ manners, learned at Greg’s side with painstaking practice. She smiled brightly and put out her hand. “It’s nice to meet you, Mrs. Sadler, I’m Kiera Cameron. I hope you don’t mind me intruding like this.”

To her credit, Ann shored herself up bravely and smiled back, shaking her hand with a firm, calloused grip. Ann offered her a mug of tea from the big, blue pot on the counter, which she accepted, glad to have something to warm her hands.

“My son says that you met online,” said Ann, in a tone that was definitely within shooting range of suspicious.

“Yes. I had some urgent tech issues. I needed help from someone in the area. I just moved here, actually, didn’t know anyone in the… region,” she said, all basically, essentially correct and delivered with a polite, non-threatening smile it seemed to go over well enough.

“Yes, and as you can see, she isn’t some kind of internet hacker maniac,” put in Alec with a casually teasing tone, though she noticed he doesn’t say the words safe or normal, “Just like I’ve said many times, the internet isn’t just for the maladjusted anymore.”

“Yes, alright, Alec,” Ann said, impatiently, as though it was a familiar argument, but she sat back in her chair and her smiled towards Kiera became more genuine. “I just wanted to make sure. We have all sorts coming and going from this place, of course, but I like to meet everybody face to face, you understand.”

“Of course,” said Kiera, “I have a family back home. I’d want to know, too. Of course, my home is nothing like yours. This place is amazing, Mrs. Sadler.”

“Oh, call me Ann,” she said, setting her mug aside, “And thank you. We take a lot of pride in it. This farm has been in my family’s hands since 1920, and it’s a full time job and then some but I wouldn’t dream of living any other way.”

Kiera nodded and wondered what had become of the farm by her time. The location meant that the land was still good, probably, if it hadn’t been developed in the meantime, or forcibly taken over by gleaner frontiersmen. She wondered if Alec of SadTech had preserved it or let it go.

“Alec’s destined for bigger, better, more electronic things, though, as I’m sure you could tell,” added Ann, and the both looked at Alec who had taken on a pinched expression and shifted uncomfortably. 

“Possibly,” he said, which surprised Kiera. She gave him a questioning look and he shook his head briefly, a forestalling gesture.

“I’m sure he will,” she said politely, and wondered about the uncharacteristic false modesty.

“So what was it you needed my son to fix?” asked Ann.

“It’s complicated,” she said, which was possibly the most useful phrase in the world.

“Very complicated, believe me,” added Alec, “and proprietary.”

“Proprietary? But she let you work on it?” 

“Um,” said Alec and looked to Kiera for help, but she just shrugged. He was usually the one feeding her information about some fabricated backstory, not the other way around. “I signed a thing. A confidentiality thing.”

“Alec is a surprisingly capable expert in this particular field, and the only one I could find around here,” she managed, thinking it through, “I’m out here practically on my own as a kind of… test balloon. On a project. That is proprietary.”

“Oh,” said Ann, “Right. I’m not very up on how all these tech business things work these days, I suppose. It was all upstart entrepreneurs in garages and barns in Alec’s father’s day, that’s where the real work was getting done... But see, Alec? You’re talents are already in demand, just think what you could do if you put yourself out there.”

Alec made a noncommittal noise. “Maybe,” he said. 

Kiera was going to have to get clarification about this new reluctance, at some other not too distant point, she realized.

Ann asked her about how she was liking Vancouver, if she worked in the city, where she was from originally, small talk questions. And yet Ann made it not feel like small talk, she asked as though she was truly interested. Ann had a compassionate face, she thought, understanding eyes, and listened well. She seemed to be the kind of generous, open person that was all but extinct after the fall of civilization as they knew it. 

Kiera wished briefly, sharply, that she had opted to tell the full, real story, no matter how badly it would contaminate the timeline, and then realized that it would have made this brief, comfortable interlude nasty and difficult.

Alec was surprisingly reticent, observing them both but not commenting. Then again he couldn’t make his usual snarky outside commentary while in the same room, and with family. 

When they’d finished their tea, Ann saw her out through the front door, like a real guest, invited her to come out for a breath of fresh air if she ended up staying in the city long, enjoined her to remember Alec to her mythical tech company. She saw the hope and concern for Alec raw on Ann’s face, and felt somehow that she’d promised something she couldn’t deliver. And yet knew all too well that Ann’s hopes for his success would be fulfilled soon enough, on a scale that even his proud mother had never imagined.

Once she’d come down the front walk, Kiera remembered that the car was around by the barn still, and followed the neat, white stile fence around the yard. Alec was waiting for her, leaning against the side of the vehicle with the suit bundled up under his arm. 

He looked different lost in thought, sharper, colder, more troubled, almost a stranger. He straightened when he noticed her though, his face brightening.

“That went pretty well, don’t you think?” he said when she came over, “You even survived my mom’s tea, and that stuff can be like being kicked in the teeth with tannin if you’re not used to it.” 

“What was that about, before? That maybe, possibly stuff? You weren’t just pretending with that, were you,” Kiera said, ignoring Alec’s more pleasant opening. She hadn’t meant to get into it right then, but patience had never been something she’d mastered.

“That’s um... Actually, there’s something I should tell you,” he said and then paused, as if struggling with something or coming to a decision. The silence hung for a long time and when he spoke, she wasn’t completely sure it was the same thing he had intended to say. “I’m moving into the city soon. When a place opens up. So I might be a little distracted with that for a while.”

“Really? But you’ve got a great set-up right here, and all this space, and room to breathe.”

“You said earlier it was like living in a refrigerator and you weren’t wrong.”

“Well.”

“The climate control issues are one reason. The less than stable, out in the boonies power grid issues are another. But the two main reasons are the ones you just saw this week. My family is out here, and you and Liberate are in the city.”

“Funny, I’d think those sound like good reasons to stay here,” she said, feeling that this was a bad idea even though she doubted that the SadTech empire she remembered had been built from a barn.

“Come on, Kiera, it’s not that simple anymore,” he said, “I’m involved in this now. You really want to be commuting out here to get something fixed?”

“I don’t mind,” she said with shrug, “It’s nice out here.”

“Yeah, okay. So what about Liberate then, what if they decide to take an interest in me? You really think I want them to have a reason to come out to my family’s land, where my mother is?” 

“So you want to be _easier_ for them to find?”

“Not really,” he said sharply, “But I want my family to be harder to find. And I learned something recently, and… well I learned a few things, and it all made me realize that it’s time to move on. I’ve been hanging around here, stuck, for too long. At first I told myself I was still here because I didn’t trust Roland, and then it was because I didn’t want to be like my father, consumed by the work, losing track of everything else. But I’m never going to accomplish the things I need to if I don’t get out there and start trying to build something.”

He was completely serious, she could tell that, eyes bright and intent, his cheeks faintly flushed with the cold or with emotion. He seemed reluctant to look at her straight on, but he didn’t fidget or flinch now, he was steady and self assured. Alec was so much less the awe-struck youth now, she thought.

She wondered what it was he wasn’t saying. She wondered if it was the power she’d all but promised that he planned to seek, or something else. If it was that, it was a step towards the history she remembered, the world where her family would live (had yet to live), but it was also... _Don’t do that_ , she wanted to say, _Don’t be him. You’re not the same person, you’re my friend._

“So, what does this mean for us?” she asked, alarmed, “I mean, are you saying you’ll be too busy to help me now?”

“Yes, because saying ‘I’m in this now,’ obviously means ‘I won’t have time for you,’” he said with a sarcastic, disbelieving look, “That’s not what I meant. Helping you is actually a huge part of this. I can’t promise moving won’t affect anything, but that’s not my intention. I haven’t told them yet,” he said with a nod at the house, “But I have a place lined up, someone I used to know in high school was looking for another house-mate.”

“Wow, so you’re really serious about this,” she said, not able to shake the unsettled feeling.

“Yep. You could try being excited for me, you know. This is kind of a big deal.”

“I am,” she said, trying, “Sure, I am.”

“I’m not going to disappear on you, Kiera,” Alec promised, finally meeting her eyes. The reassuring tone she knew from over her comline had a stronger effect when paired with a steady gaze and a soft smile. It was disconcerting, in a way, the persuasive canniness of his expression on a face still so youthful, but he was asking for her trust with assurance and she found it easy to give.

“It would be more convenient, probably,” she allowed.

He laughed, and grinned, and handed over the squashed bundle of the suit, apparently feeling his point was made. “Yeah, exactly,” he said, “You can come make your demands for information in person and everything. It’ll be a good thing, you’ll see.”

As she drove back into town, leaving the farm as a brilliant pink and gold autumnal sunset bloomed across the sky, she felt like she was leaving a paradise. She felt like she had lured Alec away from that paradise, though she knew he would have left it either way. She wanted to retract her influence, and she wanted to exert it further. She wanted more than anything to know what he was originally going to confess, because she was certain he hadn’t told her the whole truth.

He wasn’t going to shut her out, she knew that. She knew instinctively that certain furtive glances, and certain strange tones of voice meant that he cared maybe too much, and no, he wouldn’t disappear on her. And maybe she would see him no more often than she did now, maybe he would continue to leap to action at her every call. And maybe their friendship would remain as largely made up from jumbled, furtive communications in public, in the midst of trouble, and quiet, personal conversation late at night, uncomplicated by the awkwardness and intimacy of meeting face to face. 

Maybe ambition and the acknowledgement of raw, overwhelming talent wouldn’t rob him of his kindness and generosity the way it had the other Alec. She hoped. She hoped so hard it hurt, and felt impending change looming on the horizon like a gathering storm.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An interlude from Alec's perspective.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this shaped up almost entirely differently from what I had planned, but it does feel right looking at... later things. Still, i let go of some plans to let this happen so i hope like hell it works! Please, please let me know if it feels right and in character to you!

The house he moved into in town was big but it was full of too many aimless 20-somethings who don’t know how to how to look after themselves. They all had dead end jobs that paid badly because those are the only jobs around for 20-somethings, even when they’re bright young people with good degrees. The other kids in the house-share came home exhausted and dispirited and did the absolute minimum to keep the place habitable. They ate take out and drank together and complained together and were wholly incurious about Alec holed up in his room, seemingly awake at all hours and working on mysterious things. 

Their lives seemed both more illusory, made up the fleeting and minute, and more real, more believable to him than his own. Their reality was mirrored on television and social media, it was the zeitgeist, the substance of society in their time. It wasn't pleasant, and it seemed endless, but it was concrete, and ordinary and made up of the large but expected hurts and woes that generally made up the experience of young adulthood. 

He couldn’t connect with them in any but the most superficial ways. He tried, he kept trying, but his own perspective was so strange. He wished it wasn't. He wished he didn't feel like he was always lying to them in small and big ways.

**

He had known Ricky, after a fashion, in high school. They’d shared a common bond of being smart and soft-spoken, and of both being largely unwilling participants in an extra credit program that tried to integrate traditional arts with computer technology for a short series of badly received student shows. Ricky had been interested in creative writing and political journalism not chemisty and circuitry, but they’d liked some of the same bands and online games, had shared a sly, sarcastic wit that was often not well received by the other 15 and 16 year olds in their classes. They had also bonded over the sudden appearance of resentful step-siblings in their lives, although Ricky’s mother was divorced, not widowed. 

It had been a loose sort of friendship, the kind made up of playing video games and trashing bad movies, where more personal matters are only obliquely referenced if they were brought up at all. It was the friendship of two reticent teenage boys whose home lives were awkwardly stressful to the point where it was embarrassing to bring them up, both of them needing distance from the heavier things in life. They’d gotten along easily enough, but had drifted apart easily, too. Alec getting as wrapped up in Mira as he had, stricken with a kind of loving laziness, and Ricky going the other way, getting fed up with the drudgery and busy work of school and pushing hard to graduate early had lead to a dissolution of their acquaintance, not through conflict but through preoccupation with other things.

Ricky had gotten on with his life, it turned out. He’d gotten a journalism degree in spite of the uncertain future of print media, and had a job at a Barnes and Noble while he wrote freelance articles for various online publications. It sounded like drudgery to Alec, but it also sounded like his old friend had learned how to interface with the world in some more adult, more fearless way that allowed him to work in retail, allowed him to cold call people about articles he wanted to write and articles he wanted to get published. He seemed to have entered the grown up world in a way more definite than Alec himself had managed, and Alec found that more than mildly intimidating, though they’d still conversed from time to time through facebook and a couple of games.

But Ricky roomed in a house in a neighborhood that was about as nice as Alec could expect to afford, and their house-share had been looking for another roommate. And Alec had acquired his own new, strange, and terribly secret credentials in the world. He’d acquired a future, a promise of one anyway, and a pretty stellar one at that, if you discounted the hints of dystopian misery lurking around the edges of the hints Kiera gave him. He’d also acquired a new best friend who happened to be an astonishingly beautiful time traveler who wavered between brash and bulletproof, and incredibly uncertain and in need of reassurance. 

These things gave him purpose, made his actions, his setting out into the world feel justified in a way that his own hopes and ambitions never had. His own ambitions had only ever seemed like the littler, weaker echo of his father’s, that long-gone figure of genius who was both deified and vilified in memory, but now, after Kiera, after the message, they seemed more his own.

So he had felt able to answer Ricky’s ad, make arrangements to leave his home for the first time. He began at last to move toward that long-delayed adulthood he’d felt unentitled to before. For so long he’d been dragged down by the fact that his natural knack with science and technology was paired with a steady doubt and an unsteady interest. 

He’d been afraid that he would always be following in the footsteps of his more inventive, more genius father, whose life had but cut short at the height of his career, and in comparison would always come up lacking, only a weaker echo. It was ego as much as fear that stymied him and he’d known it, but there had always been reasons to put it off a little longer, wait and see. Now that stasis wasn’t enough for him anymore. Now there was Liberate to consider. Now there was Kiera.

Kiera was a friend, Kiera was an occupation, Kiera was a devotion. He knew it was inappropriate, absurd, unhealthy, and many other unflattering adjectives. He’d tried to look at it objectively, had tried to reorient his terms of interest from fascination with the woman herself to a more reasonable interest in all she represented, what he could learn from her. His scientific curiosity was real, his renewed ambition was real, and in many way both were related only to this sudden, vivid idea of the future as a place he was headed -- though only through the normal passage of time and not through some more violent engine the way Kiera had come to him. But no matter how he tried, the intense draw he felt had just as much to do with Kiera the person. 

It wasn’t even attraction, exactly, not in the sense of bodily craving which is what he had come to understand attraction to be. She was truly stunning, of course he wasn’t blind to that. He’d even exclaimed as much to her, at first, seeing her face for the first time he’d been unable to censor himself. But he didn’t dream of kissing her, taking her in his arms. 

He had a hard time even picturing her as a sexual being, most of the time, with the literal way she approached the world, the way flirting from people she encountered flew over her head completely. Not in a knowing but dismissive ‘I’m married,’ sort of way, but with a complete incomprehension that flirting was being aimed at her in the first place. It was interesting, or ironic maybe, because she was so clever, and strategic-minded and had a sharp grasp of sarcasm, didn’t shut herself off from her emotions, but the push and pull of social and sexual atmospherics flew right by without her notice. He’d wondered more than once how she’d come by the husband and child, if Greg was a good man or if he’d lead her, used her unknowingness against her. 

Admiring and being attracted to were different things, and he was determined not to confuse the two. The trust she had placed in him was an inviolable covenant such as he’d never known. He could manage the maturity not to start down that slippery slope. He wouldn’t. He refused.

Yet there were still things he craved, things he wished for, that he knew was an of an intimacy beyond simple friendship. Things to do with the brilliant, girlish, unselfconscious smile of hers that he’d seen maybe twice, to do with the flair of undeserved pride he felt when she outsmarted and outfought and came out ahead against her enemies. Things to do, more often than not, with that one bad stormy night when she had fetched up at his hideaway in need of help and care and shelter. 

It had alarmed him at the time, the way she had been so worn and ragged, as defeated as he'd ever known her and drifting slightly away from the world on a bright tide of fever. Kiera so often seemed invincible, because her sheer determination as much as her CPS tricks and tools. But she wasn’t invincible, she was as human as he was. She had trusted him and he’d realized he harboured a fierce protectiveness for her, no matter how unnecessary it seemed most of the time. 

He had worked hard that night, combing through reams of coding he only partly understood and ignoring the urge to hover and worry. Still, he’d looked in on her a as she camped out in his little loft room, nothing more than a long shape under the blankets. He’d realized then how terribly alone she was here in this time, if he was all she had to turn to. 

It was a staggering realization, almost overwhelming. He’d stood for a while, just outside the curtained door amidst the jumble of storage crates that lined the walkway, and realized what a huge responsibility it was he’d taken on, but also how deeply he wanted, for reasons he wouldn’t quantify, to be the one Kiera trusted above all others. 

He had also finally realized, as had been half-consciously coming to mind for a while, how isolated he was, how inadequate the Loft was for long term involvement in this endeavor. Tackling the question of the future required a power grid that could support high demand. Fighting terrorists from the future required a home base that didn’t put a target in his mother’s back yard. But most of all, if he was honest with himself the most vital and definitive, Kiera needed support, she needed infrastructure, and she needed it to be not an hour away. 

So he had decided even before he found the recording two days later. The impulse had been his own, not born from the edict from that other future self, the old, twisted, cruel one he didn’t trust. Every time he began to doubt if he was doing the right thing he would remember that.

**

Kiera came to see him a lot more than she used to. She never used the front door. She doesn’t seem to like his housemates either. Her habit was to climb in his window and climb out of it when she left, and the fact that he kept the window locked against the occasional burglaries in the area never seemed to slow her down. Sometimes she called first over her CMR, to warn him that she was on her way up, but sometimes she didn’t. 

He kept meaning to have a talk with her about boundaries, but in truth he didn’t really mind. After all, it was only fair, considering how much of her life he overheard in the course of helping her out. They had managed so far to avoid stepping on each other's toes in any real way.

She still pretty much only came by when she needed him to do something for a case, but it was nice that she’d come in person to ask, to bring him a file or a thumb drive. 

She wore this perfume now, a faint but sweet peppery floral scent that made him think of cool, dewy evenings late in spring. He's not sure where she got it, and it seemed somehow indelicate to ask or to indicate he'd noticed it at all, but it's nice. Sometimes the cool, damp rose scent of her lingers in his room after her visits, or sometimes is his first and only clue that he'll find a new project on his desk when he goes to look.

 

**

He worked at the Circuit Empire for three months, not quite that. He really and truly tried. It wasn't even his ego that was the stumbling block. He saw no shame in the poly blend uniform shirt and the need to answer to authority. Even people with good degrees and experience were struggling to find work, and he didn't expect to be the exemption to the rule. The pay was better than a couple of his house mates' and he didn't have to work for tips or serve food. 

He was unequivocally terrible at dealing with the customers, but the manager liked him and saw his talent with computers and put him in the warehouse in the back of the store with the other repair workers within days of his hire. He didn’t even mind the comfortless environment. The florescent lights in the warehouse were unpleasant and he usually went home with a headache, but the cave, as the other techs called it, was warm and dry and didn’t always smell of mold, and he never had to dispose of mice who had electrocuted themselves chewing wires, and the plumbing in the bathroom always worked. All little luxuries he didn’t know he’d been living without in the Loft.

But the routine was wearing, the dull chatter of his fellow workers eventually got on his nerves, and he hated how little time he had left over for his own projects, the far more important ones. He was used to being the master of his own time, and he found that though his patience for repetition and busy work for his own ends was infinite, it frustrated him when it was required by others. At some point in the intervening three and something years since graduation he had lost the knack of easy obedience.

It also kept him out of contact with Kiera for huge blocks of time. Each time he heard after the fact that she'd been in trouble and he hadn't been there to help, he was left with a sick feeling of guilt and frustration. After a while he had the panicky awareness that she was pulling away, feeling less able to rely on him, and becoming less willing to share her thoughts. That was a loss that was unacceptable to him. 

What's more, the money just wasn't good enough. Even if he stuck it out and moved up from almost-full-time and got promoted right away, there was no way the Circuit Empire wages would come close to getting a full lab up and running. And even if it had come to enough, he still wouldn't actually have any time to work on his real projects. It wasn't even slightly feasible. 

He figured this out within the first couple paychecks, but he couldn't think of a way around it. There was food and rent to consider, and his mother and Roland had decided that they couldn't help him out very much, not while the farm was still struggling. His father had set up a sizable inheritance for him, but it wouldn't come to him until his twenty fifth birthday, as his father believed that his own struggles as a young man had shaped him for the better. There was a provision in that inheritance for his tuition, but they didn’t think he could tap into it for anything other than school. His father obviously had never anticipated the tasks Alec would be facing so early in his independent life. 

The work he had in front of him, the real work, would not be accomplished on a retail pittance.

The solution that came into his head was not a savoury one. He could only picture with dread the fit that Kiera would have when she found out about it. But it also made perfect sense, in a way. And in any case, if he monopolized Kellogg’s fortune to make his own, then at least good Matthew couldn’t do something worse with it. Kellogg had approached him first, too, so Alec wouldn’t even take all the blame.

He didn’t trust Kellogg, didn’t trust his motives or his split from Liberate or his shows of simple greed. It seemed the only path available though, and Alec meant to wring from him every cent he could.

**

The conversation first with his mother and Roland about moving hadn't gone particularly well. Roland’s disapproval he’d expected, given that Roland thought he was throwing his life away on the cult of technology and breaking his mother’s heart by not continuing in the family business of the farm. His mother’s disapproval, though, that had come as a shock.

“But you always said you wanted to get your degree first,” she’d said, disbelieving, “You don’t have to worry about the money, Alec, your father made sure provisions were made. It’s so competitive out there, and this way you’ll be starting off already behind.”

“There is no college course that’s going to cover the things I’m working on now,” he’d insisted, “I’m not going to start over with the basics.”

“It’s already all decided? Why didn’t you say anything?” his mother had demanded, her voice wobbling in a precarious way that made him feel cruel and traitorous.

“I wanted to spare you guys the agonizing decision making process,” he’d said, trying to remain calm, “And I’m telling you now.”

Ricky’s old housemate wasn’t leaving until the new year, which he was quick to explain, so there was still time. He wasn’t about to walk out the door that very minute. He’d spend Christmas, and his always awkwardly timed birthday with the family and neighbors at the farm, and then Ricky had invited him to spend the weekend at the house-share, getting to know everybody at their pre-New Year’s bash. And then he’d be back at the farm for another couple weeks, at the very least. Plenty of time for his mother to adjust, or for him to get cold feet, or for these incipient feelings of upset and guilt to cement themselves around the family, depending on which way it went.

He began to wish he hadn’t brought it up at all, until the very last minute, when the last box was already packed. That wouldn’t have been fair, though, not to any of them. Let his mother have time to put on a Christmas to remember, since she seemed to view his moving into the city as a thing as final as if he were leaving the country. Let Julian have time to gloat over Alec’s imminent departure and fall from favour while he was still there to see it. It was only right.

Neither the familiar Christmas-tide festivities, which would be filled with uncles, cousins and step-aunts, neighbors with their younger yet more successful children trooping through the house for days, creating perpetual din and sauna-like heat in spite of the time of year, nor the unknown quantity of the New Year’s party in the city roused him to anticipation. They seemed more like hurdles to be conquered, looming on the horizon. Still, they were nearer, easier concerns than what must come next. 

Easier by far than bending his mind to making sense of that message from the future, from his future other self.

He knew he would have to tell Kiera. He nearly had, when she’d come out to the farm, but at the last minute, thinking of that hollow-eyed old man and the horrible things he’d said, he couldn’t force the words through his dread-numbed mouth. 

It was his fault she was here. It was his fault their safe past was infested with terrorists. It was his fault, or near enough, that the would-be North American Union had fallen to totalitarianism under a Corporate Congress. His fault and the fault of a few other that he would have to overtake or supercede, according to the old man, to prevent disaster. And other things, too, that he was too invent and foster, blueprints sent back from the future to help the world withstand the great rising wave of climate change that was about to break.

Kiera thought she was there to contain the terrorists, to preserve the timeline. But she wasn’t. She’d been selected, perhaps at random, perhaps because her husband was a favoured helper of that half-mad future self, and given a secret hidden away in her CMR. She carried, unwittingly, a seed of information sent by himself to himself, which he had been instructed to grow and nurture until it could change the world.

And now it fell on him, Young Alec in a present that suddenly seemed to lay idyllic and fruitful around him, to decide if he would do as he’d been asked.

**

Alec’s twenty-third birthday, three days after Christmas, dawned clear and fine with a frost so thick on the ground that he didn’t know at first, when looking out his window, whether it was snow. It had been cold enough the night before to drive him from his Loft to the house early in the evening, and take the barn cat with him so it wouldn’t face the night alone in the dark and cold. His room was small and warm and familiar that morning. The walls, decorated with old pictures and favorite posters in long-memorized constellations, filled with slow green-grey solstice light. 

The view from his windows was of the back of the house, the neat little winter-sleeping garden his great-grandmother had started, the corner of the fenced pasture where the huge maple stood, the grey glint of one weathered flank of the barn. It was so familiar to him, he knew it in all seasons and all weathers, all times of day, that he saw all of it with half a glance, or didn’t see it at all. Only this morning the house was quiet, the last of the uncles and aunts and cousins who’d descended for christmas had gone away the day before, and he had a poignant sense that he’d like to soak it in from this old perspective before it changed. Because the farmhouse, his old room, his old view would go unchanged, but he would not.

He found that it had already begun, his patience with the familiar already waning. His mind wanted to jump ahead and ahead. Still, it was his birthday, and his mother had veered this whole holiday month between boisterous cheery pride and complete refusal to accept that he was moving, so for her sake as much as anything he meant to mark every tradition in the usual way. He’d said over and over that he wasn’t going far, that he’d be back all the time, that he would have been moving out if he’d gone to college as well, but in spite of his reassurances, he seemed to have absorbed his mother’s idea that this was the last real christmas and the last real birthday instead of the other way around. Which was funny, when he realized it because for a long time he’d thought those last real ones had come the winter before his father died.

The traditions were nothing grand. His birthday came as an awkward addendum to the Christmas festivities, equally between it and New Years. When his father was still alive and he was still a kid, it was one of the few days his dad put aside his projects completely and spent the day with him. That had gone a long way to make up for the fact that most of his school friends would be too busy with their families or out of town for the break to come to a big party like the ones other kids had. 

In fact it was better, really, because sheet cake and pizza and nerf gun battles and childish chaos were easily come by at his friend’s birthdays, but only he got to have a whole day of being doted on and talked to like a real grown person by the important adults in his life come to visit. And though his mother’s little sister Suzanne was the one who was visiting, it always felt like Mark was too, his presence wholly and suddenly arrived in the house instead of the perpetual abstraction Alec had been used to from his father.

The holidays in the years after his father’s death had been difficult, and those after Roland and Julian’s appearance in their lives had been strained but at least less dismal and empty. Alec had adjusted to Roland more than Julian, whose scorn towards his step brother was biting and persistent no matter what Alec did, and eventually they’d come up with their own traditions. He doubted now, though, that they’d continue in the coming years, as his cobbled together step family began to drift apart into their own lives.

Ann was already up when he came downstairs, no surprise there. His mother was incapable of sleeping in, something he had grudgingly inherited despite his best efforts. The kitchen was bright and cheery even though the windows still showed dull grey morning twilight, and smelled of coffee, cinnamon and yeast, another batch of rolls in progress. She’d been baking at a fevered pitch since he’d announced the move, like she wanted to stockpile provisions. He wondered who was going to eat it all, now that the cousins had cleared away again. 

He sat at the big kitchen table with his coffee and eggs, the dim window behind him growing lighter. The house was still asleep beyond the kitchen, curtains drawn and lights off, waiting and muffled in the way that only seemed possible in this darkest part of winter. In the living room, though, he saw that the christmas tree was lit, it’s colored lights casting a friendly glow. His mother loved all the trimmings of christmas, even more than he had when he was little. The overburdened fir by the hearth would hold it’s pride of place til well after January first, he knew.

“Are we having a meeting here or something?” he asked, looking at the amount of dough Ann was dividing and rolling out.

“I thought you could take some with you to your friends party tomorrow,” she said.

“It’s a new year's eve party, not a potluck. I don’t think Ricky’s going to be expecting me to bring baked goods.”

“I know what kind of party it is, believe me,” Ann said, “I wasn’t always this old, you know. But you’re going to be living with these people, and it doesn’t hurt to buy their favor with free food.”

“Right. I see your point, actually.”

“I thought you would,” his mother said, “You know, when your dad and I were your age and you were a baby, I think we might have starved in that tiny, airless apartment in the city if it weren’t for my mom showing up with care packages. She’d always say she’d made too much, to save our pride, but I know your father wouldn't have minded either way. He knew better than anyone how much we were struggling. SadTech didn’t exactly get off to a roaring start.”

“Wait. SadTech? Dad’s company was called SadTech?”

“Yes. You knew that, honey, I’m sure you did. I always thought, personally, that having ‘sad’ in the name was a stumbling block, but he thought it was cute, ironic. People remembered it, anyway. And there were plenty of much stranger names around, believe me.”

Alec sat silent, absorbing this. He’d remembered but he hadn’t. The name had stuck in his mind, but that first company had been sold even before the fire, or undergone changes, or something mysterious involving a lot of money and secrecy that he didn’t remember and hadn’t ever really known. An unsettling thought occurred to him and stuck in his mind. He didn’t want to ask, he almost didn’t, but they were talking about it now.

“Mom, did what happened with the company have something to do with… with the fire?”

“No. I don’t think so, no. What makes you ask that, honey?” said Ann. She was distracted, involved with her baking, and she didn’t seem upset that he was talking about it. 

It was all a long time ago now, Alec realized. For his mother, who had shepherded him through that dark time when he was boy and been through so much more since, it probably seemed even longer.

“I don’t know. It seemed like it all happened at the same time, all that money, and that trip to California, and then Dad, the fire,” he said, slowly turning his mug in his hands where he sat at the table rather than look at his mother. 

He couldn’t tell her about the message, the future, the warnings he’d been given, but besides the omission, what he said was true. Everything that awful summer had seemed to happen in rush, the heat and excitement in the air, anticipation he had felt but not understood. The trip with his parents to that sunny american state, where he and Ann had lounged for days on a beach that was warm and sandy instead of muddy, pebbly and cold, while Mark had been busy with meetings. And then, without warning, tragedy, coloring everything that came before and after like shockwave that had wiped away so many details of that time from his memory.

Ann put aside her rolling pin, took her time wiping her hands and came around to sit across from her son, towel clutched distractedly in her hands. She was quiet for a while, looking off into the past, coming to a decision, maybe.

“Alec, the truth is it wasn’t a fire. Well, there was, after, but wasn’t an electrical short. There was an explosion,” Ann said, gently. She reached out and touched her son’s hand, stilling his fidgeting. “Your grandmother and I decided you didn’t need to know that part, not right then. Because the explosion wasn’t an accident, Alec. Your dad had an assistant, back then, do you remember? You adored him, you looked up to them both so much.”

“I remember. Kind of. Jacob, right?”

His mother nodded, and went back to folding the kitchen towel neatly in her lap. “That’s right, Jacob Knight, only it turned out that wasn’t really his name. He was a very unstable man, Alec. When they figured out it was him, he said… all sorts of things, delusional things. I just wanted to protect you.”

“It’s okay, mom, I get it,” he said, numb from revelation, “Jacob? It was really Jacob?”

“Yes, honey, that’s what the investigation said anyway. He swore he didn’t mean to hurt anyone though, and he was severely out of touch with reality. Maybe it really was an accident that your dad was there when it happened, I don’t know,” Anne said, and shook her head, “He was institutionalized, he never hurt anyone else.”

“Wow. Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”

“It’s not an easy thing to talk about for me, Alec. And it wasn’t going to bring your dad back, knowing,” she said, “Please don’t fixate on this, Alec, don’t let it hold you back. You know I don’t fully understand all the choices you’re making right now, but I’m so proud of you for going for what you want.”

And so he’d gone through the ritual of his birthday with this information simmering away in his mind, the phone call to Aunt Suzanne, the favourite dinner, the homemade cake and special birthday gift, held back from the Christmas festivities. The newer ritual begun by Roland as an overture of peace, who tried his best to extend a fatherly hand, to sit in the little dust and leather smelling study that had been Alec’s grandfather’s and talk honestly as best they could -- which was not very well or for very long but Alec appreciated that he tried. It gave him a chance to look for reassurance from Roland, something he wasn’t often compelled to do. When Alec came of drinking age, Roland supplemented these awkward talks with a small measure of his good scotch, one of Roland’s few worldly indulgences, which helped ease the way and made Alec feel at least temporarily treated as equal. 

This year he talked with Roland about living in the city and the pressures of modern living, about how Alec always had a place on the farm, maybe even more of a place than he and Julian as head of the family if he wanted it. Alec found these ideas old-fashioned, even antique, pointing out lightly that it was his mother’s role actually, but he appreciated the gesture. Roland was an odd man, but he’d always done his best to make Alec feel included. 

For once, though, there was a lot that Alec kept to himself, things about which he didn’t even consider subtly seeking Roland’s approval. He felt, perhaps not on more equal footing to Roland than before, but more aware that he had always felt like he was the child and his step-father was the grownup, and now that feeling was gone. In it’s place was a realization that Roland’s authority over him had evaporated slowly while he wasn’t looking. 

He felt suddenly that there wasn’t a grownup, a more grown grownup standing ahead of him who could tell him what to do when he was in doubt. That he could even turn to for advice, even, because as far as he knew, no one else had faced these impossible, time-bending circumstances. He was on his own.

He went, the next afternoon, to the new year's eve party at Ricky’s, armed with baked pastries and untellable secrets, and knew that whatever happened next, the phase of his life he had known was ended and a new one begun.

**


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Second Thoughts, Revisited, in essence.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the delay is inexcusable, but in my defence some of this chapter was pretty excruciating to write and fairly pivotal in terms of backstory. Also, in the middle of working on this chapter I realized I needed a detailed and finalized outline going forward because there's just so much to juggle in the plot, and doing that took a good few months and a rewatch. Barring disaster, I feel on a good foundation to move forward now.

There was, for some time, a simple fact that she had tried to ignore, and yet it was intruding further and further into her conscious thoughts. She was a single person alone in a foreign time. The terrorists had landed there with her, yes, but they were her enemy, the enemy of peace and order who brought with them the acrid, volatile taint of war. They were their own support system and worked as a fractious but effective team. She was alone on the fight for good, alone in the full personal knowledge of what was really at stake. 

Yes, the VPD were her allies, and yes Alec was her staunch friend and able help her in many ways, but they hadn't seen the tower fall, they hadn't seen the earlier bombings of civilian targets, disruption of supply lines, power and weather grid tampering that Liberate had carried out. But most of all, they couldn’t anticipate the advantages of foreknowledge and technology that Liberate had over the cops doing their best to contain them. 

She knew but she couldn’t warn without exposing herself. She had her own advantages, but she was outnumbered and far from evenly matched. It was beginning to feel like a stalemate, and that was alright, she reasoned. If she couldn’t stop them outright then she was at least holding them to an impasse.

But that brief week without her internal tech had given her a sudden and painful awareness that she far from invulnerable. The scale of the odds against her were suddenly, vividly apparent in a way she’d done her best to ignore for months. It was as though she’d woken from a dream, or heard a discordant note struck, whispering doubt in her ear. If she didn’t find her way back, if her tech failed -- Alec had said there was a limit to what he could fix, after all -- then what would become of her? The size of it was too great and too awful to think about, but the question had at last occurred to her, and left a vein of cold fear in her that she tripped over every time she remembered that uncertainty.

She wanted to forget again as quickly as possible. It was dangerous to doubt, it could be paralyzing, and now she had only her own conviction to propel her forward. Her sense of purpose kept her moving and breathing, if she faltered she wasn’t exactly sure what would happen to her, but she’d seen it often enough after the Frontiers, as the fist of the Corporate Congress tightened around the tenuous North American Union that had been their last best hope of prosperity in the face of the new era. She knew very well what became of people who couldn’t cope. She couldn’t let that happen to her. 

But as the dark, wet, lingering autumn finally melted away to a bitter, clear winter, and the gaudy holiday displays were packed away once more, as the people of the newly born 2013 bundled up and bent their heads into the bleakest, grayest part of the year and most resembled the stilted and wary society she had known back home, her new awareness didn’t fade. She could ignore it given effort, she could forget it in the midst of a case for sometimes days at a time. She couldn’t erase it altogether though, or avoid it for long. Her firm hold on denial had started to slip

**

The Mayor’s assassination took them all by surprise. 

Kiera and Liberate had been in the alien time for nearly a full year, and Liberate’s activity had dipped into such a profound lull for a few months that she’d almost been able to believe that they had run out of plans or resources. Or that they had fallen prey to the temptations of the era, the way Kellogg had. Or even that they had splintered apart further under the combined pressures of their circumstances and multiple, violent and mentally disordered personalities. 

She should have known of course that it wouldn’t be that easy. Without the full weight and vigilance of the Protectors Service bearing down on them, in this soft and ignorant land, they likely found their obstacles slight. They had even recovered their leader, had time to readjust. She didn’t know what Kagame’s aim was, but from what Kellogg had let slip when they’d been after her grandmother, it seemed that their joint trip to 2012 had been in his plan all along. That spoke to long preparation and the mind of a chessmaster who didn’t mind taking suicidally insane risks, a terrifying but not necessarily stable combination. She knew better than to assume that there wasn’t an endgame in mind, even if Kagami’s group was quiet for the moment, and even if she couldn’t make sense of it from the current moves on the board.

Figuring out that Liberate was behind the assassination wasn’t difficult, nor was talking Dillan around on letter her work as a free, or freer at least, agent was also not much effort with the increased threat level. Putting it in a larger context was another matter.

She wanted to talk it through with Alec, the way she had in the past. His mind worked on the large scale more nimbly than hers, it had never been trained out of him. But Alec wasn’t around as much as he used to be, despite his promises to the contrary.

She couldn’t blame him. She didn’t want to be angry at him for doing what was necessary anyway, starting to scrape together an independant life, trying to build a foundation for the bigger and better she knew he was destined for. It was strange though, and different, and far more uncomfortable than she liked to confront to not have him answering her every call like it was the most important thing.

They’d had the argument more times than she could count at first, her trying to set boundaries with Alec and then Alec taking her to task when she was upset with him for not responding quickly enough when she was in a tight spot. He could respect her privacy entirely and she could reconcile herself to some delay, some catch up in the midst of a dilemma, some failure to communicate, or she could continue to expect his immediate response and participation and accept that he had to stay on top of her feeds to accommodate her. 

“Both is not an option, Kiera,” he had told her more than once, “I don't have superpowers and I don't have a chip, so you need to pick one.” One evening towards the end of a particularly bad stretch of days when she'd snapped at him, he had reiterated the point and added, “At the very least, I need to to pick one of the other to get angry about. It isn't fair to keep punishing me for both, not when I'm trying to help you.” 

She'd been very much chagrined to realize that she had been expecting the impossible. And also to realize that she had gotten used to the company, the friendly presence at her side even if she alone was aware of it. She’d grown more and more used to calling on his help and chatting with him over cases and early 21st century oddities of culture, even to the silent reassurance of knowing he was there to call on if and when she needed. Alec had been a near constant companion even though they’d only met in person occasionally.

Only now that connection was cut. Alec was busy. She was busy. It was probably healthy. More normal, less codependent, less like she was completely monopolizing Alec’s time and energy for her own ends. Her guilty conscience often reminded her that pulling back was something she’d always meant to do, it was fairer to the young man whose life she’d essentially invaded. Still, no matter how rational she tried to be about it, Kiera was startlingly bereft.

As the long, dreary winter stretched on into a grey, sodden interminability, Kiera began to realize that Alec was more than just busy, he was actually avoiding her. 

And that was fine. That was perfectly normal for friends to need a break from each other sometimes. A year of being inseperable was a stretch, maybe, and Alec had done a lot for her, so he deserved a break. And it maybe he wasn’t used to having responsibilities he couldn’t put off in order to help her and felt awkward about it. Or maybe he had a girlfriend now, and felt awkward about that, though she had absolutely now idea why that would be a point of contention between them if it was the case. 

Only there were still certain inconvenient factors, like Liberate, like her false cover with the VPD, like her being stranded in the past, things with which she still needed Alec’s help. More than that, Kiera knew him very well by then, and she didn’t think he would dodging her if there wasn’t something serious going on. Disappearing just wasn’t like him. Chances were, given the circumstances, she had reason to worry.

**

He knew he had to get Kiera to come pick him up but he was putting it off. He didn’t really know anyone else in the city well enough to call besides Ricky and his friends -- and Kellogg who wasn’t even worth considering. He wanted to see her, too, hear her voice. He’d been scared when they crashed but mostly it hadn’t even been for himself, it had been for what would happen to Kiera if he was killed. He’d even thought, as his mind raced in the face of the prospect of his imminent demise, of what his future self had told him, that he’d been promised something and also that a great deal was still required of him, and now none of it would be happen. He’d felt something more like confusion and petty annoyance than fear in those few seconds.

But death hadn’t come. He hadn’t even badly hurt. And then he was scared, realizing what had almost happened and hadn't. It had shaken him a good long while, waiting for the ambulance, trying to see if Ricky was alright, listening to Tracie moan in pain, trying to get some sense out of Nadia, who seemed unhurt but completely out of it on the flash. He alone was sober, so he marshaled his fumbling hands and screaming shoulder to call for help, and explaining to dispatch what had happened his voice had been steady and assured.

He had more experience with life or death crisis than his friends, he had realized, even though it was usually on the other side of a comline. 

Afterwards he'd been ashamed of himself for playing along. It was humiliating. He felt like a child who had misbehaved and been caught at it, which was something he couldn’t stand even when he’d been a child. He’d tried to humor the people who he’d hoped would be his friends, he’d played along and tried to be part of the group for the first time in years and look where it got them. He felt pathetic for wanting so badly to please his new friends that he’d gone quietly along rather than risk their anger but stop them from doing something so idiotic.

He thought it would be alright. They were only going five minutes down the road. The flash wasn’t supposed to kick in for fifteen or twenty as it was metabolized, as Ricky had explained. By then they were supposed to be ensconced in the strange, dark, bohemian 24 hour cafe and bar that Ricky’s strange friend Ivan owned, reclined in a nest-like booth and listening to Tracie’s friend’s band play. 

It was also, technically supposed to be a double date. Ricky and Tracie had been trying to set him up with Nadia for a while now, with a series of double dates and group outings. She was smart and pretty and very quiet but not shy, coming out now and then with cutting sarcasm that impressed him but also made him wary. He’d wanted to be interested, he wanted to find a place among this group of friends. He’d wanted to find something real to bend his emotions towards so that he could begin at last to let go of certain impossible longings and inconvenient devotions. He’d wanted to try.

But dinner had been awkward, even more than the last one. Possible because of the last one, where Nadia had drunk enough to become chatty and flirtatious, and after which he’d waited with her for the cab he’d called, worried about a pretty girl alone on a dark night, and she’d turned and kissed him with sloppy eagerness and he’d frozen and backed away. She’d taken it gracefully, eager to believe he’d not wanted to take advantage, but the atmosphere had been strained ever since. He’d almost begged off before dinner, and again before they even decided on the club, but he’d gone along. And then the flash. And then disaster.

He didn’t want Kiera to know about any of it. He didn’t want to reveal to her that he was just an immature kid after all. He didn’t want to talk to her about roommates and awkwardness and just why he’d been so willing to put aside his better judgement for a setup that wasn’t working. He also wasn’t crazy about the idea of waking her just after dawn and trying to break the news to her and then asking her for a favor. Her temper was quick-burning and stinging and was not something he enjoyed unless it was aimed at someone else.

He called her though. He had to. 

“Alec?” she asked groggily, once she’d answered her phone at last, and then there was a soft rustling noise. She was still in bed. “Why are you calling me? I mean why are you calling me, is something wrong?”

“I, um…Listen, Kiera, it’s all okay now, but something’s happened. I was hoping you could come and pick me up.”

“What’s happened? Pick you up from where?” she asked, her voice rising with concern.

“The hospital downtown,” he said, as calmly as he could, and then, “Don’t worry, it’s not a big deal.”

“What? Are you alright?”

“Mostly. Yes. I’m fine. There was an accident, Ricky and the gang convinced me to…” he tried to come up with a way to put it into words, Ricky high and pushing him to play along, the ten seconds when he was sure they were all going to die, and failed. “Look, I’ve been up all night and I’m kind of scrambled. I’ll explain it all later, if you’ll come?”

“Of course I will, Alec,’ said Kiera in this small, hollow voice that seemed almost childlike. 

He’d hurt her, he realized, by implying he doubted that she would help him. He’d been trying to undersell it. He was fine, after all, achy and shaken up, shoulder popped back into place and throbbing, but fine. He hadn’t wanted to make it sound like an emergency. Damn it.

“I’ll text you the address. Everything’s okay, really,” he repeated, but knew that as she was there in person she would see that it wasn’t the case, not really. 

**

As strange as it seemed, she hadn’t thought of her sister very often in years. Hannah had taken up so much of her attention as child. Only a year younger than herself and clever, funny, sly and headstrong, Hannah had in many ways been the more dominant and mature of the two of them. Hannah was the ringleader and Kiera was the nervous tagalong, the awkward girl that their school friends didn’t like to play with unless Hannah made them include her. 

In another life, in a world more like the past Kiera found herself, Hannah would have been an artist, or maybe a musician. Or maybe, if she’d had the chance to grow up without the twisting, stunting pressure of addiction and grief and poor resources, she could have any kind of accomplished woman, a journalist like she’d wanted, or some kind of worker for the greater good. Hannah could have done such great things, if given the chance and the safety that would allow it. Kiera had always thought so. 

It was a big part of why she chose to go to the Academy even though there were rumours that the Universities would be reopened before long and her counselor at the comprehensive school thought that her grades were good enough that she should stick around for another year in order to take the assessment tests. Her father had been in the military, was still a respected and powerful man, it would open doors for her, she’d thought. His name carried some weight, but her mother had divorced him, and taken her and Hannah. Her mother was known enough in Cascadia's better circles that people paid attention, that people noticed that she was becoming more outspoken and subversive, and was urging Hannah down the same path despite the dangers. Kiera had been scared. She’d been scared that her mother would get reported, or that their father’s name wouldn’t be enough to shelter Hannah and herself from the black mark of her mother’s disloyalty. Scared that her mother and her sister would go a step too far and the three of them end up driven underground to one of the seedy activist cults outside the climate protection sector, or worse yet, quietly disappeared.

There was safety in obedience. There was safety in being a military family, her own loyalty added to her father’s sterling record and continued service to SadTech. She could spend a few years doing her duty under the auspices of Henry Francis Cameron’s name, and Hannah could go to the University, and then both of them could lead nice, unquestionable lives within Vancouver’s well-shielded boundaries.

Only those few years on the frontiers had been a hellish struggle that she’d had no way to understand or prepare for at sixteen, at a new, wide-eyed seventeen when she was deployed. The Academy’s course had been shortened with the increasing tumult, a respectable two and a half year program pared back and back, without warning to the incoming recruits, to a hurried 12 months. There were promises made that interested veterans would get their tuition paid for if the University was back by the time they were decommissioned, but by the time Kiera had reached that crossroads, she felt she’d been aged a hundred years by what she’d seen and what she’d lost, and the thought of returning to student-hood, especially among the untested young men and women who would remind her painfully of the lost Hannah, was nearly abhorrent. 

She missed nearly all of Hannah’s time in adulthood while she’d been in the Wars. Kiera saw her a few times on leave, and by the time she’d come for those last vigils at their father’s hospice bed, something had already begun to change in Hannah. Kiera had thought it was her education, her worldly friends, thought the distance between them came from the fact that Kiera had seen so many things she never wanted Hannah to even hear about, for fear it would the dim the unselfish brilliance of her. Then she’d started getting messages from Hannah over the net, asking for money, hinting at trouble. Then she’d started hearing from her mother, a rare and shocking thing during her time on tour, asking what she’d heard from her sister. By the time she was released home for good, Hannah had disappeared, and Kiera never saw her again. The ragged woman with the manic light in her eyes, lost in the grips of delusions, she’d managed to make contact with a handful of times, that was not her sister. 

Kiera had hoped so fiercely at the time, had begged so hard for Hannah to follow her home, for Hannah to get help. She’d pressed names of shelters and doctors on her. The time before the last time she’d seen her, Kiera had taken her by the arm and half-dragged her back to Kiera’s tiny apartment, planning to contact their mother the next day. She’d been been convinced enough that night that Hannah would soon be on the road to recovery that she’d been angry at all Hannah instead of worried, smarting over how much she’d worried, and how much she’d sacrificed in her sister’s name. She hadn’t said anything, treating her sister carefully so as not to scare her off. Hannah had been gone when she’d gotten up early the next morning, and Kiera always wondered if she should have done something different that night. Gotten their mother sooner. Hid her anger better. Dragged her to a hospital instead of waiting to make arrangements for a rehab clinic the next morning. No matter how she wondered and agonized, it didn’t change the path of events that followed. 

But Kiera realized with time that the bright and sparkling quality of her sister’s mind was dimmed, and then absent altogether the last couple times she tracked Hannah down. She was using more than flash by then probably, and Kiera never wanted to know how she managed to keep getting ahold of the drugs out there, how she subsisted. All Hannah had cared about was the euphoria, the dream. She didn’t think there was anything left in the world for her, and when Kiera began to look at the world she’d grown up in through the lense of past, she began to wonder if Hannah hadn’t been right after all. That all life could have promised a vibrant, tender-hearted person like Hannah in that world was the pain of hurtling into the ever more ravenous and diminishing dark of a bleak future.

Kiera didn’t often think of her sister anymore, especially not now in the constant confusion of 2012, now 2013. But when she did, she thought that it should have been Hannah and not herself that was scooped up and sent back, that in this place she would have thrived.

**

The ride across town to Ricky’s had been deathly quiet. Alec knew she was upset, seemed more unsettled even than the early hour and his minor injuries and her usual nerves over driving in the city would provoke. He felt bruised though, in body and in mind, and so tired that half-thoughts drifted to unresolved conclusions before he could find a way to voice them.

Kiera had stared at him with big, worried eyes as he came out of the hospital. She’d parked in the drop off lane and stood leaning on one of a revolving array of nondescript unmarked cars she signed out to use around the city. She’d frowned at the sling, but said nothing as he approached. 

“I’m fine,” he assured her, “Stupid but fine. Let’s sit down, alright?”

And so in the parked car he’d told all, in brief, shamefaced terms, about the night out, the friend’s cafe-bar, Ricky and Tracie and the flash. He didn’t tell her about Nadia. He didn’t tell her about the 10 seconds of terror. Kiera wouldn’t look at him, arms crossed tightly across her chest, a pinched, drawn look on her face that was not anger. 

“Are you absolutely sure he called it flash?” she asked him, when he was through.

“Yeah. Does it matter?”

“It shouldn’t be here yet,” said Kiera in a tight voice, “It’s bad, Alec. Don’t ever take any, do you understand?”

“I’m not going to. Especially after tonight. But come on, you know what a control freak I am. The idea of getting high is about as appealing to me as the idea of appearing naked in public.” 

“Not even once, no matter how tempting it is. You can’t,” she insisted roughly, still talking largely to the steering wheel instead of to him.

“I just said I won’t, Kiera. Didn’t you hear me?” he said, concerned, “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” she said shortly, and with that she’d driven them away from the hospital at last.

on the street by the house they sat in silence, Kiera watching him carefully as though searching for signs of illness or madness and Alec trying to shift the weight of exhaustion and aching ribs so that he could face the prospect of walking inside.

“I’m alright,” he said again, “I feel like a prize idiot for not getting out of the car, or stopping them, or I don’t know, calling a cab maybe? I knew it was so stupid and I just let it happen… But we all lived to regret it, and I’m alright. I’m not gonna fall apart on you, so you can stop looking at me like that, okay?”

“Sorry, I… Sorry.” she looked away, fiddling with her seatbelt. “Do you need a hand getting out?”

“No, I’m just moving slow,” he said, preparing himself mentally for the next steps. “Do you wanna come in for a bit? You deserve some coffee at least, in return for dealing with this.” 

“That’s okay, you don’t have to….” she paused, looking indecisive, “Don’t you want to get some rest?”

He laughed bleakly, thinking about how little interested he was in lying down and letting his subconscious play with the events of the night before. “No,” he said, “I really don’t. Don’t think I could, anyway. I want to wait up and hear the all clear on Tracie’s surgery, anyway. Ricky’s staying at the hospital at least until then. Everyone else will still be at work like this is a totally normal day, and to be honest I could use the company.”

“Well, then, yes,” she said, already back to watching him carefully, “Coffee then would be alright, if it’s no trouble.”

So she trailed him inside, through the front door for once, both of them subdued and quiet. Alec coffee with the trusty chemex while Kiera watched him with the same big, worried eyes, and he wanted to ask what that was, what doom she was imagining, but his head was all white noise and the bitter determination to keep trudging along without thinking to deeply about anything that might clear that gentling fog away.

It was a nice day, bright and almost clear as the sun came fully up, particularly lucent and crisp. The kitchen and its familiar totems were painfully ordinary and unchanged, cast in unforgiving blue daylight that showed well worn, oft-cleaned dinginess of the communal space. Alec still felt something of a guest in the rooms outside his own, with a clear sense that it was Ricky’s place, and Dylan’s and Skyler’s, not his, and today was no different. If anything he felt even more displaced by those moments of fear and by a night spent waiting under florescent hospital lights, in misery and boredom, as though it had altered his sense of reality. Now, with friendly company and back in the familiar kitchen of the house where he’d chosen to live, he felt bewildered, like a mistake had been made and he’d found himself in the wrong place, what am I doing here, how did I come to chose this for myself, and startled also by Kiera’s presence in his not-quite home, on an invitation he hadn’t supposed she’d accept. She must be really worried, he thought.

She was dressed, uncharacteristically, in a large dark blue sweatshirt, half-zipped over a soft looking t-shirt. Her hair was pulled back into a messy ponytail with fine, dark wisps floating gently about her face. She must have rolled directly from bed to come get him, he realized with an odd sensation in his stomach that was too many feelings together to be quantified. She seemed to have relaxed a little as she watched him putter at the hob, and now instead of the haunted look, her face was soft and bleary, and she slouched listlessly. He felt like doing the same, only he doubted he’d get up again for hours if he sat down. 

“Breakfast,” he said suddenly, perhaps with more urgency than was right for Kiera seemed to give a start, “I think we should have breakfast. I’m sure I can make something even one-handed.”

“Oh, Alec, that’s alright. Anyway, you know I never eat this early in the morning.”

“I do know. And I’m not really hungry either, but I’ve got to take something for my shoulder soon, and means eating. Besides, you should eat breakfast. Regularly, I mean. It’s bad for the body to fast so much.”

She huffed softly in annoyance. It was an old argument, and didn’t respond well to being reminded about her bad habits.

“Right. Sorry, not the time. Besides, everything sounds unappetizing. I even agree with you about eggs at the moment,” he joked as he peered with half-hearted interest into various cupboards. 

In the end, he made oatmeal on the stove because it didn’t require much more than stirring. While he stirred, with his back turned and his tone carefully neutral, he broke the drowsy silence and asked what had bothered him since the car. “So, flash isn’t supposed to be around yet?”

“No. As far as I know, it doesn’t end up on the streets for decades.”

“But you’re familiar with it?”

“Yes. It’s epidemic in my time. Had you heard of it before last night?”

“I don’t think so. I don’t know. Tracie was talking about this new, non-addictive stuff that helps you focus that’s getting popular recently, maybe that was flash. But it sure as hell didn’t seem to help them focus.”

“If it’s the same, they say it’s not the drug itself that’s addictive, it’s the euphoria it causes,” she explained, “Not everyone is susceptible, but for those that are… it’s almost impossible.”

“You knew somebody who got hooked, didn’t you?”

“Everyone knew someone who was hooked or pretending not to be.” 

He turned to look at her directly then, patience wearing thin. She met his gaze with that bland impassivity she did so well. “Come on, Kiera,” he said, voice pinched in frustration, “You’ve been watching me like a bomb about to go off all morning and I didn’t even try the stuff. You don’t have to talk about it if you really don’t want to, but the least you could do is tell me why you’re acting like I’ve practically been tainted just by proximity.”

She sighed, but her defensive nonchalance shifted. She reached for a discarded newspaper on the table, glanced at it and tossed it down again, and then got up altogether and paced over to the sink, as though trying to distance herself from the conversation. 

“It was my sister,” she said at last, “She was a few years younger than you. She’d gotten a scholarship at the newly reopened university, and she was struggling to meet the grade requirements. Our dad had just died, and… well, anyway, suddenly she had spending money for the first time in her life. Flash was all over the campus, I guess for some kids it really did work as a study aid but mostly it was a party drug. I don’t know why Hanna tried it but she got hooked and dropped out.”

“I’m sorry, Kiera. I can’t even imagine. Was your family able to help her?”

“No,” she said bluntly, “No, Hannah ran through her inheritance and mine, and most of my mother’s and then she disappeared. I looked for her, but I didn’t find her before the flash killed her. My mother said that we were luckier than some families who spend years looking for their lost addict on the streets and never find them, at least we wouldn’t spend our whole lives wondering, but…” she shrugged tightly and shook her head, out of words. She was fighting tears and trying to pretend like she wasn’t.

“But you didn’t see it that way,” Alec said, knowing her outsized sense of guilty responsibility.

Kiera nodded mutely.

“I don’t know if you’ll believe me, but I know with a certainty that you did everything humanly, or inhumanly possible to save your sister,” he said, and turned back to the stove to give her some privacy. Kiera didn’t say anything in response, but at least she didn’t protest.

“And I’m staying way the hell away from flash. I’ll do what I can to warn the others off it, too,” he added.

“Good.”

The idea of eating sounded even less appealing than ever, but it seemed likely they both needed some sustenance and comfort. He felt lightheaded with compound emotion. There didn’t seem to be one part of his friend’s life that wasn’t riddled with tragedies. He wondered abstractedly what Kiera’s mother thought had become of her other daughter, or whether she even still existed to wonder, and then wished he hadn’t thought of it. He resolved to spend a weekend at home as soon as he got rid of the sling. 

“What I don’t understand,” he said, trying to shift the mood, “Is why Liberate would introduce this deadly substance into this time. They say they care about the struggling, dispirited working people, right? What can it possibly get them to turn their target audience into addicts?”

“They’re hypocrites, Alec. They’ve never cared about innocent bystanders before, certainly not when it came to the thousands who died in the SadTech tower bombing.”

“SadTech? You never told me it was a SadTech tower,” he said, thinking with even greater bafflement about the recording from his future self, “And that lunatic old man still sent them back here? Jesus, what a mess.”

“Well, I’ll agree with you there,” she said with weary emphasis, “I have no clue anymore.”

He brought them both bowls of oatmeal laden with maple syrup and fresh cream. They lingered over them in tired quiet as the spring sun overtook the early morning greyness and filled the kitchen with tender golden light. Eventually Kiera roused herself from the mood of thoughtful abstraction that hung in the room and admitted she’d better go into the station and start digging into the source of the flash. His own determination to grit his teeth and stay awake had faded in the wake of warm food and a fresh dose of pain meds easing his aches. He felt himself already swimming on the tide of sleep sitting up at the table but still he called out to stop her. He owed Kiera some honesty, a great deal of it in fact, after this morning.

“What is it, Alec?” she asked, and he could tell her attention had already shifted on to the next thing.

“Listen,” he said, “There’s a pretty big conversation we need to have, about future me and some other stuff. Now’s really not the time, but I just wanted to give you a heads up.”

“Sounds serious. Are you sure it can wait?”

“It can wait until I’ve rested you’ve put a stop to this future drug, at least,” he said with a tired smile.

Kiera looked skeptical but accepted it and told him she’d be in contact later about the investigation, when he was feeling up to it.

“Wait, Kiera?” he asked, stopping her again, going for melodramatically pathetic, “Can you give me a hand up? I can’t currently seem to move.”

She huffed a laugh and came back to lever him upright. 

**


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the truth comes out. A truth anyway.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for the delay, sometimes these things are unavoidable. I have the next chapter written, so it will be posted before too long. A week or two, I think. It needs proofing, and I need to get the part after it farther along than it is now to be comfortable posting. 
> 
> I have incredibly mixed feelings about this chapter, and the one after, so hopefully you can get something out of it. please let me know what you think.

Alec was rid of the sling the next time she saw him, but not rid of the pinched, guilty look he’d had the morning after the car accident. He’d asked to meet up by the water, at the promenade by the farmers market where his family sold produce in the summer and fall. The market building was still shut up for the season, and shoreside paths were deserted due to the persistently dismal weather, made worse by the chill wind coming in off the bay. They had the overlook all to themselves, and Kiera was sure that that was no mistake on Alec’s part. She’d had a quiet sense of dread of whatever it was he wanted to tell her ever since he’d first mentioned it that strange morning in his kitchen. When Kiera got a clear look at his expression, as he stood stoically waiting for her arrival, she wanted to turn and go back the way she’d come, go back to her warm hotel and her pleasant ignorance, and let him continue avoiding her. She knew better than that, though.

 

They sat on one of the wrought iron benches because though the day was frigid, the last couple days had been dry, and it seemed likely to be a long conversation. After a few fumbling starts, Alec had fallen silent and slouched forward, avoiding her gaze.  

 

“Just tell me, Alec,” she said sharply, “You wanted to tell me, so get it over with, whatever it is.”

 

“It wasn’t an accident that you’re here. You didn’t just happen to get caught in the field of the time device. You were picked to go. I picked you. He did,” said Alec, all in a rush. “That malfunction, last November, I found something in your CMR. The old man embedded recordings, data, blueprints, all sorts of very intentional things for me to find.”

 

“What,” asked Kiera slowly, “What does that mean?” The implication of his words was blunt and obvious but also impossible, so unwanted that she couldn’t absorb it.

 

“Alec Sadler, your Alec Sadler from your time, he had a plan. It looks like you were picked to be an unwitting part of his mission to change the past. He put information in your CMR that I can use. Use to make things, use to change things, to know things ahead of time. He hid the files in a way that I would find them, used a password that I would know,” Alec explained again, his expression intent and wary. He watched her carefully, trying to see if she followed, if she could accept. 

 

“Kiera,” he said, like an apology, “From the files…. It looks like there were supposed to be others. It was supposed to be a team of four. Elaina Davis, Sanford Kim, Jonathan Pulaski, and you. You weren’t supposed to be here alone, Kiera.”

 

She sat staring at him. Her face felt numb, her body stiff and foreign as though she looked out from a cumbersome mask or from some vantage deep within. There was a pervasive sinking feeling in her chest, as though she was being lowered from a great height to a great stillness, even though her heart beat hard, a furious pace that tried to catch up to the size of the realization. Not an accident. Chosen. Chosen by the past-future echo of the young man beside her. 

 

She’d met him briefly, at the plaza park by the memorial, well preserved and hale for his 85 years but undeniable old, with fathomless blue eyes that looked into hers with seeking sharpness but no recognition. No familiarity. She’d met him again on Greg’s arm at a SadTech function, a launch or a founding anniversary or a tasteful, secular holiday-new year party in the beautiful, expansive SadTech lounge high above the city. Mr. Sadler had found her by herself, looking out at the view, having gotten tired of smiling politely while Greg talked shop. He’d spoken to her politely, unexpectedly gracious and charming — after all the news feeds said of him, who would have thought — told her of how greatly he valued Greg, inquired after her work, her son. Yet the exchange had been courteous and no more, nothing suppressed and knowing, no hint that the Mr. Sadler she remembered in any way recollected to had lived any of the past they were now sharing.

 

“But he didn’t know me,” she objected, the numb incomprehension seeping inwards, her sense of time and order and cause and effect all at once grinding to a halt and colliding, “He didn’t remember this. How did he know that you would — had known me?”

 

“He didn’t remember. He didn’t know. None of what we’re living now had happened for him, Kiera. That’s incredibly telling about the nature of time travel, actually,” he said and then gestured loosely as if to wipe that tangent away, “But he was clear in his recordings. You were a hope, a guess. The four of you to balance Liberate and, essentially, infect the past with the memetic virus of resistance.”

 

“So I was just…. Picked? Out of the blue? Or because of Greg? He knew about Sam, my husband was his right hand man. Didn’t he care that he was leaving a child without a mother? Leaving his valued assistant a widower?” She said, her voice climbing with incredulity.

 

“I don’t think he did. I don’t think he saw it that way. He wanted to change history, Kiera. He has changed it. He thought— he wanted… He wanted his own timeline overwritten, so that it never happened like that. So that it was erased.”

 

“My timeline,” she said, helplessly, “My home. He wanted it destroyed?”

 

“Fixed, he said. Prevented from such misery. He said he wanted to avert the suffering of mankind. What he described….” Alec shook his head with disbelief. “Kiera, why didn’t you say that it was like that where you came from? That it was that bad?”

 

“It wasn’t that bad. Maybe things aren’t ideal but… I had a good life, a steady job, a caring husband, a gifted, gentle little boy who didn’t deserve…” she took a rough breath and found that she was crying, or near to tears, the promenade swam brightly in front of her. “Who is he to say that he can just try and wink us out of existence?”

 

“I don’t know. He sent you all back, that’s all,” Alec said shortly. “I can show you the recordings, you can hear yourself. All I can tell you is what I found.”

 

“Wait,” she said, latching on to something smaller, half noticed but easier to understand, “you said you’d found these file during that malfunction. That was four months ago. Why didn’t you tell me?”

 

“I thought about it, I almost did, but… I didn’t want to hurt you. What good would it do, knowing? The other Protectors either haven’t landed yet, like Kagami, or something happened to them. If they were here, we would have known. As for the rest… Would know all that really have helped? Is it helping now?” He said, and his tone was defensive, condescending in a way she didn’t like.

 

“You still should have told me,” she insisted, “I don’t care if it didn’t really change anything, that message was put in my head. He used me. I deserved to know as soon as you found that.”

 

“I’m sorry,” he said, but his tone was angry, frustrated rather than contrite, “I just didn’t see the point in making you suffer more than you already were, when nothing I found was going to change your circumstances at all. I was trying to protect you.”

 

“Okay. That wasn’t your job to protect me, but okay. I can see that you thought you were helping me, but you should have told me,” she said with tight frustration, “It was about me, after all.”

 

“Yeah, and it was about me, too,” he told her, desperate, “Don’t you get it? Those recordings might have been stored in your CMR but it was meant for me to find. It was a lecture from my future self, a blunt, grotesque picture of what a monster I became and what horrors my complaisance helped to create, and how he wants me, as I am now, to change it all. That’s a hell of a startling look in the mirror, Kiera.”

 

She sat in sullen silence for a time, trying to process what he’d said. All of it was too big, and too outlandish for it to settle into thoughts she could understand. What had become of the other three? Elaina had been her partner on duty for a year before the accident — and now that easy euphemism no longer fit. Elaina wasn’t here, so what had become of her. Kiera turned away from the mounting horror of that line of thought with a physical shift of her head. Then something else occurred to her.

 

“Alec, what changed your mind?” She asked, wary.

 

“About what?”

 

“You said that you’d decided not to tell me, you didn’t want to hurt me… say, for the moment, I accept that,” said Kiera, enunciating clearly around her sense of dread, “Why are you telling me _now_?”

 

Alec dropped her gaze, looked out over the water instead. The bluster seemed bleed out of him all at once, he seemed smaller beside her, more still. She wasn’t sure what she read in him, regret maybe, or sorrow, or fear.

 

“Things have changed,” he said, “I made a choice. With the options open to me, and the things…. He said about what’s coming in the next ten years, I think it’s the right one. But it’s not a nice choice, Kiera. It’s not something I would have done if there had been another way…. I don’t think, anyway. And I wanted— I need you to be able to understand why.”

 

“What did you do, Alec?” She asked, her voice thin, a cold shiver creeping up her neck. Maybe it was the February air, the changeful breezes coming off the water that seemed to chafe her over sensitized skin. She found she had braced herself as though for a physical blow.

 

“I made a deal with Matthew Kellogg. We’re going into business together,” said Alec. 

 

Kiera stood. She paced away toward the waterfront and then part way back to the bench. She couldn’t bring herself to sit beside him again. She felt deeply repelled by the reality of what Alec had said, but it was a lot easier to take in than messages from the future and theories of the mechanisms of time. Alec was in business with her enemy. 

 

She thought again of the old Mr. Sadler with the attentive but cold eyes. That man was the one who had chosen her, for unknowable reasons and because of unknown qualities, to be stranded in a foreign and hostile time. That man was her own Alec, her sweet-voiced friend. Or he would be, in time, if history stayed the same. If he really could be that mercenary. Maybe the seeds of that old man were already there in the Alec she knew, in spite of the way he seemed an entirely different person. Maybe she simply hadn’t wanted to notice.

 

“Why would you do that?” She asked, at length.

 

“Kellogg has money, a lot of it. He knows the field, or he did— and how different can it be now? But more important, he knows who I am,” Alec explained, “He’s in on the secret. What other investor could understand why I need to work on certain projects, and at certain times? What other partner investor would go with my side project of assisting a special secret agent?”

 

“Oh, Alec,” she said, and crossed her arms tightly, clinging to the fabric of her sleeves, desperation stinging in her throat, “oh, no, no, you can't do this. This isn't right. You aren't like this, not here. You have to undo it.”

 

“I’m the controlling partner, Kiera,” he assured her, taut voiced, though he didn't look hopeful. He didn't look confident, he looked resigned. Alec stood from the bench and paced passed her to the balustrade at the edge of the overlook, moving with stiff, unfamiliar temper.

 

“That’s not going matter to a man like Kellogg, don’t you get it?” she called after him, incredulous, “He only ever goes along just as much as he has to to get his way.”

 

“Well, listen, Kiera. It's a brutal goddamn wake up call to learn this about yourself, but apparently so do I,” said Alec, his blunt patience gone and biting, barely-held anger in its place, “I’m using him, he's using me. It's not going to be fun, but there's people's lives to consider. I think you know that,” he said, turning sharply back to face her, “Sometimes I wonder if the reason you kept the finer details of just how terrifying and grim the world had become in your time to yourself because you knew I would want to change it and then you couldn't go back. I'm truly sorry about your son, I'm sorry about your husband. I'm sorry that you are grieving and trapped here in this place you hate. But there are millions of people who are are going to suffer and fear and starve and die, or live their lives in fucking brainwashed paralysis if we don't start making changes before it's too late.”

 

“That’s not fair,” she said, recoiling and stung, startled that he could say something so cruel.

 

“No it isn’t. None of it is. Do you think I wanted to turn 23 and learn I will be largely responsible for the the downfall of humanity? And learn that I'm responsible, solely responsible for the suffering of the woman who I… for the suffering of my best friend?” He took a stuttering breath and dragged his hands back through his hair in a sharp gesture. “Nothing about this is fair. I’m just trying cope with the facts in front of me.”

 

“I wasn't keeping it a secret. I wasn’t.” Kiera insisted, small voiced. “It wasn't a plan to keep you in the dark. It's just that without context, all that, from my time, things sound worse than they were… It's hard to put into words.”

 

“Do you ever think that maybe it was that bad, exactly as bad as it sounds, but you were just too used to it?” Said Alec, somehow sounding both concerned and accusatory, “Like, why didn’t you ever tell me that you were basically a child soldier?” 

 

“I was not a child! For god’s sake, I was 17 when I was deployed, legally an adult,” she said, outraged, defensive. Alec just looked up at her though, with such sorrowful tolerance that she started to wonder, that something in her started to wilt. Seventeen was the legal age for everything in her time, drinking, voting, having sex, getting a full time job, buying an apartment, getting sent into a war. It couldn't be so different here, could it? 

 

“Okay,” he said, with a gentleness that set her teeth on edge, “Okay, but even though you liked you life there, you can’t say that society on the whole had progressed, right? And it was a lot harder for a lot of people.”

 

“Climate change hit hard,” she said, “You have to understand that. We all had to accept that we had to adjust. And people like Liberate, the Frontiersmen before them, they just made it harder for everyone. It’s not as clear-cut as you’re making it sound, Alec. You didn’t live through it. I did.”

 

“But Sadler sent blueprints,” he said, and came to stand before her, carefully not too near, not too avid, but pleading, “He sent me the tools to soften the blow. Don’t you want that out there? It doesn’t have to get as bad as you remember, Kiera. There’s a chance. We have a chance to make it better. Don’t you see that I have to take it?”

 

It sounded so reasonable, when he said it like that. It sounded irrefutable, and necessary.

 

“But Kellogg is a terrorist,” she told him, raw-voiced, “He didn’t just accidentally get dragged along. He helped with their messaging. He helped to recruit. He helped them build the bomb that killed thousands of people, most of them people who worked for the company that you built. If Greg hadn’t been assisting Mr. Sadler on a private project that day, he would have been in the building that came down. How can you work for a person who was willing to do those things?”

 

“I don’t see that I have a choice,” said Alec, with a finality that set her adrift, “Working with Kellogg is the lesser evil here. I don’t like it, but it is what it is. Can you deal with that, Kiera? I still want to help you and be your friend. I just had to think about things rationally.”

 

“ _Rationally_ ,” she repeated.

 

“Yeah, I know. But given the parameters, yes. Rationally.” 

 

“But you’re brilliant, you have so much talent, you don’t need someone like Kellogg. If anything he’ll tie you down. If his past ever comes out, you’d be finished. You could even be charged with…. I don’t even know. Something,” Kiera said, pleading, trying to bargain. “It’s not worth it.”

 

“Kiera,” said Alec with a tight shake of his head and a bitter humor, “If Matthew Kellogg’s past ever came out, no one would believe it. And there’d be a good chance that whoever tried to expose him would get locked up for sounding delusional.”

 

Oh right, she thought with a sense of wild incredulity, how do keep forgetting that the crux of this is still time travel. A physical impossibility, a monumental absurdity, a madman's dream, that had happened with terrible violence to her, and the Liberate members, and in a very real way to Alec — the tender, bright eyed Alec of this time with his pale brown curls and his eagerness of youth, so far removed from the polite but deadened old man — just as completely as to them. This improbable, near-magical thing had divided her and Alec, and Liberate, from the rest of the population and given them a share in a powerful yet damning secret. Her allegiance with Alec and their shared agenda had divided them even further, and for a long time she’d had the sense that this secret secured the two of them into a partnership, a team with an unquestionable bond that was part shared covenant and part unexpected affinity. But maybe that had been an illusion. 

 

“Is there still time to undo it?” She asked, defeated and knowing already that there was not.

 

“I’m not going to undo it, Kiera,” Alec told her, gentle and firm. It was the way she used to speak to Sam sometimes, when he asked difficult questions about the nature of her job and the things he’d heard on the morning newsfeed. “I really am sorry this has hurt you. Please don’t let this mess up what we have.”

 

Kiera’s heart rebelled against such a tone. She looked down, letting her hair shade the edges of her sight and avoiding Alec’s insistent look. She needed to find a way out of this conversation, needed to put off thinking about any of these revelations until they didn’t seem so likely to swallow her whole, and drag her down. 

 

“I can’t do this right now,” she said, “I need time. I need… I don’t know. This isn’t right, Alec, none of this is right.” She meant Alec’s deal with Kellogg, yes, and the awful realization that she had been chosen by Mr. Sadler to unwittingly destroy her own home. But even more fundamentally, that she was a lost woman in an alien land, and she had clung to the first friendly voice, the first helping hand she had found here, and centered much of her sense of security around him, even knowing who he was, and now. And now. She couldn’t bring herself to complete the line of thought.

 

“I know it all sounds bad,” said Alec, stepping towards her as though he couldn’t help himself. “Look, I know it sounds bad, okay? But please, Kiera. Just come and look at the lab. Watch the recordings. Think about how much good we could both do with this money in spite of where it came from.”

 

“I can’t,” she said, “I can’t _any_ of that. You lied to me. You betrayed me, Alec. Both of you.”

 

“ _No_ ,” he insisted, his expression was wounded, pleading with her, “He did, I know he did, but all I ever wanted to do was help you. Even this was for… please believe me, Kiera. I just wanted the resources to be able to help you. You have to trust me— you are always the most important thing.”

 

She glanced at Alec and away, and caught a sense of him without the overlay of familiarity. A young man, slightly built but intense, the boyish look he’d had just a year ago shifted now to something lean and watchful, wound tight and filled with something suppressed and wild like brilliance, or madness, or desperation. She caught, also, a look of longing, an aborted movement towards her that made her flinch into stillness for a second, as she remembered again that the way he cared for her was too much, too much, must not be taken on. She backed up, she stepped away from him, wary of being drawn in by the intensity of him again.

 

“I’m going to go now,” she said, and nodded, having decided, “It isn’t fair to dump this all on me and then ask me to just,” she gestured tightly, “just get over it. I need time. I need to think. I need be by myself.”

 

“Okay. If that’s what you need, that’s… that’s okay,” Alec said, after a beat or two of strained silence. He sounded hurt, and worried, like he wanted to protest but wouldn’t. “I should have told you sooner. I know that. I’m sorry, Kiera.”

 

“Just give me some time,” she said, not able to listen to his apologies, “Just—“ she shrugged, a tense gesture that was almost a flinch. Just take it back, she wanted to say, but of course that was impossible. That’s not how it worked. “There’s nothing you can say right now that will fix this.” 

 

The low, grayness of the day had broken up, and a thin March sunlight winked and glared on the tide, dazzling her eyes. She blinked rapidly, put her head down and turned to go. “Don’t contact me for a while,” she said, over her shoulder.

 

“But what about Liberate, your cases,” he called after her.

 

“I don’t know,” Kiera called back, frustrated and too strangled with emotion to placate and think and explain. 

 

She hurried away from the waterfront overlook with a stiff-legged rigor, determined not to flee outright, but unable to stay and keep arguing. She knew that Alec stood and watched her until she turned a corner and left the promenade.

 


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A holding pattern. An interlude of silence. A first meeting.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yes, I was going to wait longer, but it was done. And I'm a couple scenes into chapter 8, with confidence that it will continue. And Chapter 6 on its own felt like short changing you guys. so here is the next part a week early.

**

There was a point, later, when she realized that she had gravitated towards Greg, not out of profound lasting romantic feeling and attraction, but because she had instinctively seen that he would take care of her. It was how he approached her in the beginning, as well, a friendly young face and a guiding hand in a time of difficulty. 

Her father had been ill, dying, though even her mother hadn’t been willing to use that word. Kiera hadn’t lived with her father since her mother had taken her and Hannah away in the divorce, not quite ten years previously. He hadn’t been completely absent from their lives since then, but had hardly been present either. He’d become the benevolent but tongue-tied figure of weekend outings and birthday visits and the yearly lavish Christmas Eve party. But he had supported Kiera’s decision to join the academy, the only one who had, and since then he and Kiera had corresponded when they could, she had started to maybe, possibly, know him a little better.

Even so, he hadn’t told her he was sick until he went into the hospital the first time, a brief and oblique reference to the fact that things weren’t as well as he’d said they were and a request that she come home if she could. Kiera was part way through the fourth year of her service with the PKs, with something like eighteen months until she would be done with her tour, but her father’s name and his SadTech connections carried weight. She’d been rotated back to a neutral territory base after a stint on the Frontiers, so her superiors hadn’t hesitated in granting her leave.

It was a shock to her system to find herself back in the affluent city for the first time that year, out of uniform and unbound the regular timetable of base life. Kiera had taken a hotel room rather than stay at her mother’s apartment. Her parents had found themselves in a stilted and regretful kind of truce in the midst of his illness, but Kiera still found herself barely able to speak to her mother. She had tried to picture what it would be like to go back home, to try and make peace there. But she had chosen allegiances so far from what her mother wanted for her, had turned against the upbringing in rebellion that her mother had tried to provide. Kiera had simply never felt strong enough to be what her mother had wanted, and she didn’t want to live under the cloud of disappointment and guilt that would surround her back home, especially with Hanna away and living in the dorms. 

Kiera tried to spend time with her father. She visited every day, almost every day — some days he had tests or treatments or procedures and on those days he only wanted her mother, or to be left alone. While Kiera was there, in hospital room, she found she couldn’t stay for very long. No matter how clean, and spacious and comfortable it was, it was a her father confined to a hospital. He’d left it so late to tell her and Hannah that he was sick, she knew their time as father and daughter together was running out. She marched through her days, her visits with him, bringing treats and books, sitting through bland lunches on trays in his room, all with a mania of suppressed grief as she tried to experience as much connection and companionship with him as she could. She was forced to face the fact that she hardly knew him, not as a person with likes and dislikes and feelings and foibles. And in turn, her father barely knew her, not as she was, a grown woman serving the Union. He still seemed to view her as a girl, or a student. Her father was curious about her, asked her so many questions, but at the same time he didn’t want to hear about the Frontiers. In a very real way were strangers, and they would not get the chance to change that moving forward, because Henry Cameron wasn’t going to be moving forward anymore. 

Sometimes, more often than she liked to admit, Kiera would duck out when her mother or Hannah showed up for her own visits, or when the nurses and doctors came in to do their checks, overcome with dizzying feelings of relief and regret. She would sit in the visitors lounge, instead, or the cafeteria downstairs, telling herself that at least she was nearby, at least she was there in spirit. The medical facility was state of the art, new and pristine and aesthetically designed, a SadTech funded complex not at all like the cramped PK outpost medbays, but it didn’t change the fact that it was full of sick or distraught or silently worried people. Just as often in that vivid, suffocating two months, she wandered through the crowded and changing landscape downtown, or went back to her hotel to sit and think, or sleep. She didn’t know what to do with herself, stuck in a limbo of grief and boredom and bewilderment.

She met Greg while he was visiting her father, and she’d sat quietly in the corner, watching them together. Talking with Greg was the most animated she’d seen her father since she’d come home, and mostly they had talked about work. Greg gave updates on all these teams and these projects at SadTech that Kiera hadn’t understood, but had been happy to see her father taking an interest. Greg talked like Hank would be back at work any day, and her father smiled indulgently at him and played along. Her father had tired quickly though, and Kiera had left when Greg did, to let him nap. 

Greg had invited her for coffee, and they ended up talking the afternoon away. Later there were more invitations, long walks and nice dinners and lunches, and startlingly personal conversations where Greg gently drew the story of her life out of her, and Kiera found suddenly that she had been longing for years to tell it all to a sympathetic ear. Greg had urged her to stand up to her mother, to not feel guilty that she still couldn’t connect very well with her father now that he was ill when he’d hardly given her the chance to know him when he was well. Greg had helped her fill her the long, empty portions of her leave not taken up by visiting hours or sleep.

She had been not quite 20 and Greg was 29, but he seemed far more worldly than she was, far more at peace and confident. They became close friends over that last month she was home, and Kiera had known that he was interested in more than that with her. She sensed his attraction in the solicitous care he took with her. She had felt something in return, but she hadn’t been a place where she could reciprocate, she was too distraught, too confused, too distracted to know exactly what she felt. And after all, she had another year on her tour of duty before she was free to return home, so it wouldn’t be fair to begin a more serious relationship with him then. 

All at once her leave had been up, and she’d sat with her father all morning before her transport out. They talked about his work, and Greg, and how he regretted that he’d missed so much of her growing up. He told her that he worried she’d gone into the military because it was what he had done, and that he didn’t want to her to feel that she had to earn her respect. She’d held his hand and kissed his cheek and left with the delicate, impossible sense that his health wasn’t really so bad. That maybe with treatment and rest and care, he could live years yet in that pretty room high over the city. 

Kiera’s father had died three months later, and she wasn’t able to go home for the funeral, though she was given permission to use the private streaming room on base to talk with her mother and Hannah when it happened. 

Greg sent her a message of condolence, full of sympathy and longing and eloquent phrasing, and she realized then that his interest hadn’t faded, that he meant to pursue her. Kiera found herself picturing what it would be like to come home to him when the rest of the last year was up. She imagined him meeting her at the rail station, smiling in his bashful way, perhaps he would even reach out and embrace her — he’d done that more than once before when she’d ended up in startled, overwhelmed tears during one of their quiet talks. 

Of course by the time Kiera had been discharged, having declined to re-up, Hannah had gone off the rails. Kiera found herself pulled in so many different directions, trying to settle into civilian life, trying to make peace with her mother, trying to find Hannah in an overcrowded city, one lost young junky among so many. Greg did court her, as she’d sensed he would, but once again their relationship was constantly interspersed with moments of family crisis. Greg helped her and supported her and soothed her, and she came to love him so deeply, but it wasn’t the kind of romantic fairytale of movies or evening serial dramas. It wasn’t funny misunderstandings and delighted reunions, and a slow natural progression, but a relationship carved out in-between tragedies and tensions. 

It was such a strange six months. When Kiera was with her mother, at the old apartment, or out in the city, asking at hospitals and shelters and food banks and needle banks and homeless aid stations and Piron nutirstations if anyone had seen Hanna, she felt like she lived one kind of life. Not a particularly nice kind, but a real life, full of strife and purpose and determination, clawing free of her sense of helplessness. A kind of life that followed a routine. A kind of life that didn’t feel so far removed from her toils with the PeaceKeeper Service. 

When she was with Greg, it was like being lifted out of reality into someplace insulated and safe. He helped her unspool her tales of woe, and then took her out for a nice dinner. He took her to movies, he took her to friends parties, where all the people were clean and dressed with an elegance beyond what she could afford, and spoke with confidence about art, news, work projects and company gossip. One time he took her dancing at a club with a live band that played music in antique fashion, and the two of them stumbled over each other on the dance floor with delighted enchantment. She spent evenings and nights, sometimes whole stretches of days with Greg in his beautiful, spacious apartment, and forgot the real world. When she was with Greg in his world, it was like living in a dream. 

While they were still looking for Hannah, Kiera didn’t tell her mother about Greg. She wouldn’t approve, Kiera knew that instinctively. That he was ten years older, that he worked at SadTech, that he was a centrist and largely unpolitical, that he was monied and sheltered, all would be marks against him. And that Kiera was seeing him while Hannah was missing and suffering would be a mark against her — or so Kiera felt at the time. She hadn’t wanted to deal with the consequences. 

The first time Greg met her mother was at Hannah’s memorial service. That had been a terrible hurtful mistake, Kiera realized within moments of their meeting, but she had needed his support so badly that day. Sarah Cameron hadn’t been receptive to dealing with an outsider, and a SadTech man at that, being polite and ingratiating to be his prospective mother in law. She had been upset by what she felt were Kiera’s misplaced priorities. Kiera left the memorial that day sure that she had disappointed her mother in irreparable ways. But at the same time, it felt as though her mother’s antipathy towards him had cemented the reality of Kiera and Greg. Like it had put her on his side, like stepping into the future and leaving her mother’s disapproval behind in the past.

Later, years when the dust had settled, and Kiera was home by herself a great deal with a young Sam and had time to think, she realized that she had kept that stark division as long as she could. She had needed to believe in the dream of her and Greg, because all the rest of her world had been panic and anger and grief. She had needed to cling to him and pretend life was lovely and carefree. She had needed to lean on his stability, his patience, his adoration of her. Greg had presented himself when she needed someone most, not once but twice, and he had loved her and charmed her and set out to sweep her off her feet, and so she loved him.

With time, though, Kiera found herself wondering how long the relationship with Greg would have lasted if it hadn’t been for Sam. They loved each other, she was sure they did, even in those few brief times when she knew that Greg had been seeing someone else. But it was a practiced and friendly love, the companionship of partners and helpmeets. Sometimes she suspected that, having met her as a girl of nineteen, when she was in a fragile state and in need of much care and guidance, Greg had seen her as a girl he needed to take care of. That he never learned to see her in a different way even though she had moved on. And, even worse, sometimes she felt relieved that Greg looked elsewhere for romance and thrills from time to time. 

She loved Greg, she loved Sam, she loved their settled life and the safe home she came back to after the brutality of working CPS. But somewhere along the way she had lost the thread of the beautiful dream that had filled her with such joy in the beginning. She had lost also the sense that she had fallen in love with Greg because he was so much better and kinder, more clever and good than any other man she’d ever met, and begun to wonder if she’d fallen in love — at least partly — because he was there.

 

**

Liberate hadn’t been making much noise, at least in ways Kiera could find on her own. The seasons were changing and the weather had turned warm and damp, the days running the gamut from daffodil sunlight, to sun showers to blustery torrents. March passed quickly, in a succession of small tasks and small cases. She had observed her one year anniversary of being in the past at the beginning of the month by going for a drink with Carlos and Betty, though to them it was an ordinary Thursday outing to blow off steam. 

Then she had gone back to her hotel and wondered about what Alec was getting up to with his new SadTech getting underway. She had wondered if she should have asked to see the recordings found in her CMR before leaving him to make his own mistakes. She was relieved that she hadn’t had to sit through them and face the bare facts herself, but she was curious too, what the old man had said. What he had intended. If maybe there was something Alec had missed. Whether she could make any connection between the old man and the young man seen side by side.

When that anniversary had passed, she did her best to put the whole thing out of her head. It didn’t look like defeating Liberate or going back home was a possibility anywhere between here and the horizon, so in the meantime she had to find a way to endure. 

April was a pleasant month, another quiet month with whispers of a protest group that might or might not have been Liberate’s work, and nothing more. The days lengthened and the air turned sweet. Kiera started going for a run every evening to keep in shape and tire herself out. When she still felt herself to be over-restless and at a loose end despite the extra activity, she started going in to the station every morning as a matter of course, helping Carlos as though she was his normally assigned partner. It helped to fill her days, and it built trust with VPD, though once or twice she caught Inspector Dillon watching her with curiosity and veiled suspicion. 

“We seem to be seeing a lot of you around here,” Carlos said to her one afternoon, “Doesn’t your Section Six have enough work to give you anymore?”

“We’ve had some… reorganization recently,” she told him, a believable reframing that fit reasonably well, “it looks I'm going to be here for a while longer, keeping an eye on things with Liberate. I might as well be useful in the meantime, don't you think?”

“Well, we appreciate your help. And your resources,” he joked, “Nothing like an in with the best intel to do wonders for the clear up rate.”

“Hmm. Well, it's possible I'll have less access to that intel, I’m sorry to say. Like I said, reorganization. I'm going to be working with fewer resources for a while.”

“Oh,” said Carlos, chagrined, and then genuinely worried. “You're not in trouble or something, are you? Because if they were really worried about catching Liberate quicker, they could have sent you more support.”

“Yes, they could’ve,” Kiera said. She thought of the missing Kim, Polaski and most of all Elaina with a bitter smile that Carlos clearly didn’t, and really couldn’t understand. “No, I’m not in trouble. The project has just been de-emphasized. For the moment, anyway.”

“Ah,” said Carlos, and then laughed in his good natured way. “I’ll pretend I know what that means, as usual. Anyway, I think it’s time for a coffee run, don’t you?” 

**

When Kiera had been growing up, Hannah had been her best friend and confidant. It had been a friendship formed out of her real admiration for her sister, how fun and vibrant she was, but it was also a friendship of necessity. The apartment their mother moved them to after the divorce was not that big, and Hannah’s personality was large. Better to be pulled along by Hanna with affection and pride than be battered by the strength of her will. And then of course, she had grown up and gone away and disappointed her sister with her Loyalist tendencies. 

After Kiera entered the Academy, she face such a range of adjustments and new pressures that for a long time she didn’t get close to anyone. She was tall, slight and pretty, and plenty of people approached her out of some kind of protective impulse, or out of a curiosity born of the fact that she didn’t seem to belong. But many had drifted away again when they found that she was awkward, opinionated, close-mouthed and not often open to blowing off steam, as they called it — what she called it was anywhere from irresponsible to dangerous, and she wasn’t interested. She was a good student, smart and with a strong sense of duty, which earned her praise from the instructors, which in turn didn’t do much to endear her fellow Cadets. Kiera learned to keep her own council, and by the time the year of Academy instruction was over, she had gotten used to following the distant and impersonal will of the Service instead of chasing along behind Hannah, a feeling that was thrillingly nearer to independence than she had known before.

On her active tour she was close with her squamates out of trust and necessity. She knew how to speak with them in shorthand and get the job done, survive, leave no one behind. She knew how to face horrors together with them, and not speak of it again, not look each other in the eye and admit how bad it was in case they couldn’t continue to endure. She knew how to drink with them and argue about the weekly streamed entertainment or improvised soccer game or cutthroat rounds of cards, but nothing else, nothing deeper. For the longest stretch, keeping the borders of the ceded Gleaner land, it had just been six of them, and she had been close with all of them and none of them at the same time. And when their time was done and they’d all gone back home, she didn’t find that any of those friendships had lasted, or that she had let any of them know her at all.

Then, of course, there was Greg. Maybe their marriage hadn’t been a great romance after all, and maybe he was a disinterested husband, but he was a good father to Sam, and a good partner to her and had been her very best friend. Greg was the one who helped her has through the major decisions of her life, the one she told about troubles at work, even while her old sense of duty might have told her to keep her worries about CPS’s intentions to herself. Even when nothing else felt right, even within their marriage, Greg was the person she always felt safe to turn to in crisis. His advice, his patience, even the repressive quality in him that so grated on her at times, they were things she depended on without fully realizing it, so deeply was their pattern embedded into her life.

But it had been a year and more since Kiera had had Greg to lean on. Every decision had been her own. 

Or sometimes she had turned to Alec. He didn’t guide and advise the way Greg had. No, Alec would talk. He would give facts or suppositions, he would lay out whole branching trees of reasoning and counter-reasoning until he had turned the problem around from every angle, and eventually Kiera would come to a decision, or often decide to put off a decision, with the vague sense that no course of action was much better or worse than any other — outside the staggeringly obvious. So perhaps, at times, Alec helped her not to decide, which was something she’d never felt comfortable with before. 

Alec was a good, neutral sounding board, despite his relative youth and his sheltered life. He was able to break down problems into their component parts, often presenting her with small snags she hadn’t even thought of yet. He was her guidebook to early twenty-first century culture, and the sympathetic confidant in her ear at the end of a long, confusing day. Alec’s advice, his teasing, their rambling discussions and tangents over time and culture and their mutual lostness within it, the petty sniping to be had over small disagreements, and the confidence Kiera had that Alec would always be there if she needed him. All these things, it occurred to her, meant that she really had a best friend for the first time in her life. 

And then all at once, she didn’t have him. She’d cut him off. And she couldn’t say that she was wrong to do so, not after the kind of secrets he’d kept. Not after he’d allied himself to a conman and former terrorist. Not after he’d waited months and months to tell her that she was not here by chance — which was knowledge that had brought her new fury but also a sense of peace with the fact that she was not torn from her family by mere coincidence. Not after he had poured out his secrets and shaken her trust in her one true friend and then begged her to just get over it, be alright with everything. She was still angry, she was still hurt, and she couldn’t get over it and reach out to him. But now she was alone.

Alec had been her partner in this strange time, now — for the time being at least — he wasn’t. It felt different than having drifted from Hannah, and it felt different from being without Greg. Not better or worse, but different, a dull and muted but persistent ache. Kiera was acutely aware of her aloneness in the world, the smallness of her self and her life in the face of hugeness of the world and the task ahead of her, all in a way that she had never been before. 

 

**

It was an unseasonably cool, grey, drizzling day late in Spring, and Alec hadn’t spoken to Kiera in almost three months. He had settled into a state of resignation where he no longer hoped she would break the silence any day now, and instead was beginning to wonder if she would even reach out if there was a crisis, or if she had found new support elsewhere. Mostly, though his days were taken up with arrangements in the Lab and prickly, unsettling conferences with Matthew Kellogg. The reality of his business agreement was beginning to sink in, and Alec wasn’t left with the rosiest picture. He had a long climb ahead of him, and despite Kellogg’s assurances that he, Alec, would be the controlling partner, Alec had had to match wills with Kellogg every step of the way.

It wasn’t as though Alec hadn’t expected the battle. Despite what Kiera had implied, he was not naive, and he knew that Kellogg wasn’t going to give in and lead a blissful life of altruism after he had tasted wealth and avarice. But Alec was used to pitting his own strong opinions against those of his stepfather and his step brother, against what his mother expected of him and his teachers had expected of him — even what his future self expected of him. He’d gone into it with confidence in his experience and his stubbornness. 

Alec hadn’t expected it to be that tiring with Kellogg, and that quickly. He’d worked hard and fought hard, harder than he’d ever done in his life, for three months, and he still had a feeling of going backwards instead of forwards, for all he’d really done was discover how long, and how impossible the road ahead really was.

On that Thursday morning, in the beginning of June 2013, Alec awoke with small and frustrated impulse of rebellion. He dressed quickly, dodged roommate Skyler ambling home from his overnight shift at the radio station, and marched out the door without breakfast, but with a sense of purpose in mind. Today he was going to take a break. A small one, maybe, long enough for a nice breakfast at the New Moon Cafe and a breath of fresh air. Or maybe he would take the whole day, and do nothing except live in the world for once. He was going to remind himself why he was doing all this, and he was going to take steps so as not to get worn down before he’d even really started. He was the boss after all, Alec assured himself, from time to time he should remember to act like it. 

In the coffee shop there was a girl. A girl close to his own age, he guessed. She had mussed, red waving hair, a bold color on such a low, grey day, against the coffee shop’s browns and blacks. She was sitting on the sofa in the lounge area in the back corner, just in his line of sight. She seemed to preoccupied with a sketchbook, bent over it in concentration, but from time to time she looked up and around with a slow steady gaze, as though seeking inspiration, or checking on her surroundings. When she did, he could tell that she was pretty, with a soft oval face and dark, watchful eyes.

Alec had his fair trade coffee and his organic egg sandwich, eating at a leisurely pace, and catching up some reading on his tablet despite his best intentions to take a break. But almost without meaning to, he found himself keeping track of the pretty redhead. And then one time, as he glanced her way, she looked up as well for her careful scan around the room, and their eye met. Alec froze, startled to be noticed, his heart beating fast. Then he smiled and shrugged sheepishly, yes, so you caught me looking, it’s true. And then, across the room, across the back of the opposite couch, the girl blushed and smiled, and looked at him, her head tilted just so, as if in invitation, or perhaps just a bit coy. 

The waitress came by to clear his dishes, and Alec asked for another cup of coffee, stalling, hoping he would work up the nerve to go over and talk to the red-haired girl before he left her behind as another missed connection. When the waitress was gone, though, Alec saw that the girl had approached him, no nerve needed. Her pretty cheeks were pink and flushed, she looked skittish and her battered sketchbook was clutched tightly in front of her, but she was still smiling. Alec stood hastily to offer her a seat, but banged his knee and sat down again, and laughed off her exclamation of concern. The two of them stumbled and laughed their way through hellos and introductions.

Her name was Emily. She had recently moved to the city, escaping the small town life. She was an artist, or she wanted to be. “It’s a hobby mostly,” she said. She’d been sketching different people in the cafe, she’d done a sketch of him, and she wanted to give it to him — he had such an interesting face, she said. “If you don’t think that’s insulting, or too cheesy or something. Here look.” Emily opened up her sketchbook to the right page and turned it around so that Alec could see.

He was flattered and startled in equal measure by her attention, and by the graphite sketch on the page. She had a skilled hand, from what he could tell. She sketched darkly and without hesitation. The studious young man on the page bent over his work, with the grayed out window behind him, and the striped coffee cup by his hand, that was him, and it was also not him. There was something about the sketch, he couldn’t put his finger on it, something just a little bit eerie. But flattery won out, and Alec looked up at the artist, Emily, with a new admiration bursting forth in him. 

“Wow,” he said in an earnest hush, “that’s amazing.”

“I feel like I’m breaking the honor code of coffee shops coming and interrupting you while you’re working,” she said. 

“I’m glad you did,” Alec assured her, “You did me a favor, really. This is actually supposed to be my day off.”

“Is it?” Said Emily, “What do you do? Something you like, I hope.”

“Yeah, definitely something I like. I’m in computers. Programming mostly. And some builds. And a whole bunch of other stuff that I’ve learned not to talk about in detail if I don’t want to bore the everybody around me. Basically, it’s a tech startup,” Alec explained, not wanting to brag but proud of the answer he could give just the same, “I, um. Run it.”

“Woah, really?” she exclaimed, leaning towards him across the table. “That sounds intense! But really cool. But intense. You really run your own company?”

“Yeah,” Alec shrugged, flattered by the admiration in her eyes, but realizing too that his situation wasn’t easy to explain. “It’s not much of a company, yet though. Basically just me and another guy. And I only kind of run it.”

Emily gave him a long studying look, maybe trying to tell if he was inventing these facts in order to impress her. Then she seemed to relax, and smile at him, fingers idly picking at the wire binding of her sketchbook. She was dressed casually, in a dark dusty rose colored sweater that was rather shapeless but somehow still flattering, clashing with her hair and giving her a girlish, vivid look.

“Well, I have to say I’m impressed,” said Emily, “You’re like, my age. And programming is one of those patience and precision requiring things that just— I tried to learn once, and I just. Could not. No wonder you need a day off!”

“So what about you,” he asked, “What do you do?”

Emily smiled wryly and shrugged. “I get by. Part time work here and there. I guess you could say I’m saving up.”

“But you want to be an artist?”

“Maybe, I don’t know. If I did art for work, I don’t know if it would be fun anymore. Maybe I’ll go to school, except then I’d need to know what to study. I’m trying not to look ahead too much right now, I’m just glad to be where I am, a new start in the city.”

Alec was charmed by her. Emily had an air of brash hopefulness but there was also something wary about her, something canny and a little bit sad. And she was sitting there, interested in him, not bored -- and not daring him to put a foot wrong or turn her down the way Nadia had always seemed. He didn’t know this girl, he had no obligations to her and no difficult history. There was only curiosity, and hope, and stolen glances at her pretty face. 

“Let’s do something,” said Alec, surprising himself, but with such a rush of suspense he knew he wanted her to say yes, “Sorry if that’s…. I don’t know, presumptuous? But I’m taking a break, trying to live a little, and you seem…” he shrugged, blushing, “Does that sound…?”

“Yes, that does sound,” she said, grinning, rescuing him from his stumbling, “What d’you wanna do?”

Alec realized that he hardly knew the city, not on his own. His mind went blank. “I guess I didn’t think that far ahead. Hang out? What kind of thing do you like to do on a rainy, muggy day like this?”

“I’d say let’s go have a coffee, but…” she grinned and gestured at the cafe around them.

“Let’s have one anyway,” Alec said eagerly, “Or let’s do something. I don’t care, something fun. I’ve lived in the city since January, but pretty much all I’ve done here is work.”

“Really? But that’s like more than 5 months! Come on, you must have done some fun stuff around here.”

“A few evenings out with my roommate and his friends, but after the last one ended in disaster…” he shrugged, racking his brain. The kind of outings he went on with his mother in farm stand season wouldn’t wouldn’t be very impressive, and neither would the kind of casual rambles he’d taken with Kiera — not the overlook, he thought distractedly, probably not the overlook ever again. The clubs he’d been to with Ricky and Tracy and Nadia wouldn’t be open for hours, and what’s more weren’t really his taste. 

“A movie?” Alec suggested, uncertain.

“Hey, you know, I heard about this funky art house theater from my roommate. They’re playing this marathon of old scifi all week. I don’t know if you’re into that kind of thing but… we could check it out, anyway.”

“That sounds perfect,” said Alec, and then prodded by the profound irony, he laughed, utterly pleased with the alignment of fate for once in his life, “Oh my god, you have no idea. That would be great.”

**

The fresh sweetness of spring had melted into a balmy hot summer. Kiera’s hotel manager got the air conditioning unit in the window tuned up and ready to go again. She wondered how long she would be living there, if she should try and save up for a better place before the winter chill rolled around again. She wondered if she would be able to rent or buy property here, even if she wanted to, as she had no real identity in this time. Time passed and Kiera ambled through her days less and less sure of her purpose, slipping ever further from her certainty that she would return home. Liberate was quiet, perhaps lulled by the lovely, mild summer, but Kiera knew better than hope they’d be quiet for long.

Kiera worked on as Carlos’s partner, and started turning to Betty for help with the computer side of cases, and Betty was so flattered she seemed almost giddy.

“What happen to your special Section Six guy? You know, top secret tech support that you always used to go ducking out to contact?” Asked Betty, part teasing and part genuine curiosity.

“You noticed that, huh?”

“I did. I notice everything in this office… even some things I’d rather not notice,” she said with a grimace and a nod in the direction of Dillon’s office where he was shut in and having a noticeable, bitter argument with someone who Kiera guessed was his ex, and then over at Carlos flirting with that sleek, pretty Detective from Fraud over by the coffee station. “So anyway. Secret agent tech support gone bust?”

“Something like that,” Kiera agreed with a tight smile, “But I noticed you too, actually. I’m sure you’ll be up to the task.”

After a while of working together, as Kiera got over her awkward over-formality and Betty stopped trying to simultaneously view Kiera as someone to impress and also as the competition, Kiera found that Betty was someone nice to talk to. Someone she liked to spend time with. A casual friend, like Carlos was, another novel thing in her life. They were a sort if team, it seemed. Betty and Carlos the old friends, with their own shorthand and easy rapport, and now Kiera was brought into the fold. A third wheel maybe, but she was invited, and welcomed with respect and graciousness. 

She and Betty ditched Carlos sometimes for lunches or coffees if there was no pressing casework. Betty was a bright, outgoing person with empathy for everyone around her. She was also detail oriented and highly opinionated, but her opinions were on subjects deeply unfamiliar to Kiera, internet dating, gaming, and hacking, mainly, so Kiera was entertained rather than put in the mood to argue. Betty was also stylish and confident in a surprising way. She didn’t put on a persona. She didn’t dress like a cop, or in the kind of juvenile hacker chic that Kiera had seen at that game programming company. She was envious of the way Betty always looked and acted like herself instead of the environment around her. Kiera had complimented her outfit once, and tugged self consciously at the same grey blazer that she wore so often, and Betty had offered to take her shopping some time.

“I know the best second hand shops. Lots of great practically new stuff like you wouldn’t believe. I’m sure you could find tons of stuff to express yourself with. Plus who knows if that trusty green trench coat you have is going to make it through another fall, so that’s a good excuse” Betty said with a sly smile. “I went through a trench coat phase a couple years ago, but they're the absolute worst when they get wet all the way through, aren’t they?”

Kiera was glad to have friends. She was glad to go shopping or try gaming with Betty. She was glad to have drinks and pizza and talk shop with Carlos. She got the sense that both of them were a little worried about her, but they weren’t intrusive about it. Kiera was relieved to have something to do with her free time other than work out or worry alone in her hotel room, and people to talk to outside of herself and Alec. 

But there was so much that she couldn’t say to Carlos or to Betty. There were stupid, ridiculous, fantastical secrets she had to keep, and even if she did feel free to explain it all to them, she had no idea how they’d react. Maybe anger, maybe suspicion, maybe sadness that their friend the secret operative had finally cracked under the stress of her job. Or maybe they would believe her, but then what? 

The dual life she led wasn’t an enjoyable one. Selfishly, she liked having nice, normal, casual friends who didn’t hold her in a mutual binding made of secret knowledge. People she could talk to without the conversation always leading back to doubts and signs and loss and The Future. She felt more than a twinge of guilt at keeping them in the dark, especially in the case of Liberate’s history, but she was sure it was for the best — at least for the time being. 

In the brilliant, slow, mundane days of that summer she felt directionless, not actively miserable but as though she’d started to lose hold of the will to keep marching forward. And often in the evenings when she always used to check in with Alec, she thought of him and wondered. Her anger had dried and crystallized into a feeling far less livid, but also restrictive. She missed her best friend but even though it had been months now, she didn’t feel ready to reach out. She wanted to see the recordings and understand all there was to understand about what had been done to her — and to Alec too, she was beginning to accept all over again — but she didn’t want to face the concrete, the unyielding ugliness and struggle that meant for her life. 

Kiera found herself in a holding pattern. It was a relatively comfortable place to be, and moving out of it would be uncomfortable, so for a little while longer she would stay.

 

**

One evening, when she’d been feeling particularly low, lost in thoughts of Sam and Greg, and Alec, and Mr. Sadler and the three other Protectors who hadn’t made it through, Carlos invited her out to their usual haunt to unwind. Betty was busy with other plans, but their case had gone as far as it was going to for the time being, and she and Carlos had the long, warm July twilight ahead of them with nothing to do. 

If it had been any other man, Kiera would have suspected him of angling for a date, but Carlos had never shown an ounce of interest in her that way, and she was relieved. Kiera looked up at him from her desk in the bullpen and read friendly concern on his face, as well as curiosity. He was so earnest, so loyal and good-natured. She couldn’t tell him what was bothering her, and that night she couldn’t stand the thought of making up more lies to tell him. She turned him down.

“Something’s bugging you lately,” he said, pulling a chair over and sitting down by the end of her desk. “Betty and I can both see you’re upset about something.”

“Yes,” she said thickly, startlingly aware of the weight of their concern and the roil of her own feelings. “I am. Things have not been… Lately, things have been bad.”

“Things,” repeated Carlos, frowning. “Classified things?”

Kiera hesitated. “Kind of. Section Six things, and… It’s complicated.”

“Liberate things?” he asked seriously.

“No. I mean. I don’t know any more than you do on that front at this point. I have no idea what they’re up to.”

“Okay. Just checking,” he said. After a long pause while Carlos looked at her with a thoughtful frown he said gently, “It’s been awhile since you talked about your family.” 

Kiera looked down at her hands, tense in her lap and concentrated very hard on thinking about nothing. Carlos was worried about her. Carlos thought that she was divorced and that her son lived with her ex out of town. Carlos didn’t know what a wound he’d touched. She thought, suddenly and desperately of the bad jokes, the dry old professor type jokes Alec used to tell to get her to roll her eyes and not cry. 

“Yeah, I guess that’s true,” she said bitterly, “Sometimes you just don’t want to talk about the things you can’t change.”

“I’m sorry, Kiera. I didn’t realize it was that bad. I think I can probably guess the answer here, but is there anything I can do?”

Kiera smiled a tight, sad little smile and shook her head. 

“Don’t you ever think you’d feel better if you did talk about it with someone? Get it all out in the open? I mean, if you’re not comfortable with me, Betty’s a great listener, as you know.”

“No,” said Kiera, firm and final, “No I don’t think that would be better. At least not where I am now.”

“Okay,” Carlos said calmly, though he looked a little hurt. “Not for nothing, Kiera, but if you keep shutting people out and pushing your feelings away, you might find you don’t know how to get help when you really need it. Trust is a skill as much as a feeling.”

Kiera looked up at him again, surprised by his insight. She hadn’t thought of it that way before, but it made a kind of sense. A skill, and not a skill she had practiced often enough in her life, it seemed, because half the time she couldn’t seem to find it when she craved it most. She had no idea what to say, just looked at Carlos with a puzzled frown. 

“Okay,” he said again. He stood and put the chair back in its place. “I’m heading out now. Let me know if you change your mind.”

“Carlos,” Kiera said, stopping him, “Thank you for the offer. You’re a good partner.”

Carlos nodded, looking down at her with resignation and fondness. Then he strode off, leaving her to her thoughts.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> re: Emily's artistry. The poor girl didn't get much personality or fleshing out in canon aside from "did love Alec in spite lying to him" and "impulsive, sometimes self-sacrificing" and "dark past, sometimes violent." I can't say that she's my favorite character but i'm trying to do right by her. I'm giving her hobbies and interests. Also foreshadowing.


End file.
